


When The Sun Came Up I Was Looking At You

by lady_ragnell



Series: Are We Out of the Woods [2]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Estrangement, F/M, Family, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Recovery, See notes for warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26881726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Valira has to go home to check on the safety of the family that kicked her out when she was fifteen, and Haoti goes with her.
Relationships: Player Character/Non-Player Character(s)
Series: Are We Out of the Woods [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1532174
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	When The Sun Came Up I Was Looking At You

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** there are many difficult themes in this story, but they are generally discussions of the past rather than events occurring in the present. Primarily, as the summary says, this is a story about a woman who was kicked out by her family when she was a child and left to fend for herself going back as an adult (though any reconciliation in the story is between her and her own generation, who were not the ones to ostracize her). It also includes mentions of the traumatic childhoods of several other characters, as well as past character death (including of the POV character, since resurrected) and injury, and brief mentions of pregnancy and childbirth.
> 
> Finally, the companion piece to last year's fic! As you might guess from the extensive warnings, I meant to write this one sooner but it turned out to be A Lot so I kept procrastinating. So here it is at last!
> 
> Title, as with the other story, is from Taylor Swift's "Out of the Woods."

The first Haoti hears from it is from Kal, when he comes with fresh water for his and Iain's canteens and bread and cheese to make up for the lunch they're missing, spending the day in one of the far fields examining a blight and trying to put a stop from it.

“Valira and Quil are arguing,” he says, when they're all sitting down in the shade of a rock to rest and breathe, and says it with eyes wide and the air of imparting shocking gossip.

Iain blinks, brought up short, and it's a testament to the goodness and softness of Fairpoint Hold that it's such a shock to both of them. Since Haoti has lived again, Valira and Quil and Phi and Kithri have been at perfect peace with each other, even when Kithri scolds them all. They all know the scolding is from affection, and that it's the only way she knows how to be. If they argue, it's a lazy argument over who has to help in the kitchen or who needs to go to town for supplies or receive a guest who wants to bow or kiss their feet or make them into something to worship. “What about?” Iain asks, in what sounds like horror.

“Nobody knows. They were closeted with Phi and Terry for most of the morning, but even eavesdropping could only make out the two of them raising their voices, not what they were saying. Not without being very obvious and dealing with Phi's disappointment later.”

When they traveled together, there was friction. Brought on by the stress of their mission, by the loss of Arfil, by Haoti's presence, by damp bedrolls and impossible choices and an unspoken agreement to leave Phi in peace about it after they fought a monster from her memories and she seemed haunted for days, weeks. Valira and Quil argued about him, and how much he could be trusted, and almost all of that was Quil's terror that Valira saw too much of herself in him and that it would hurt her. They argued about who should sleep first and who should take watch. They always argued, though, for each other—Valira's refusal to let Quil retreat when a magic surge almost killed them both, and Quil's anger that Valira would think about giving up part of her soul for them.

“Haoti?” Iain asks, because death made Haoti forget how to hide his expressions and some of his thoughts must be obvious.

“If they're arguing,” he says, balancing everyone's worry with potential secrets, “it's because one of them is trying to do something the other one thinks will hurt her.”

Iain and Kal exchange alarmed looks. “That's a wholly different kind of frightening,” Kal says after a moment.

“I have no idea of any specifics, but it's my best guess for generalities.” He hesitates. “You said that Phi and Terry are in there?”

Another exchange of looks, and Kal answers again. “Is that a problem?”

Probably not. He's still learning Terry, unwilling to trust what seems to be honest and total kindness, but Phi he knows at least a little. Her desire for her companions to be safe and happy is balanced by a deep streak of pragmatism. She and Valira were the ones who forced themselves to consider killing Arfil as a mercy, and wouldn't have ever considered Haoti's offer of killing their friend in their stead. She and Quil were the ones who would rather have killed Haoti than give him an order while he wore Solomon's collar. In this case, with no knowing what the argument is, he doesn't know what side she'll choose, only that Terry will almost certainly side with her, and that Valira or Quil will come out of it feeling hurt and lonely and ganged up on. “I don't think so. Just means one of them probably isn't coming to dinner. Maybe both.”

“You think it's that bad, then?” Iain asks, hands twitching like he's thinking of standing and going back to the Hold.

There are a lot of answers he can make to that. If Valira and Quil are arguing, breaking the peace they have here, something serious must be going on. Maybe it's to do with Cordelia and Trilli, since neither of them can decide if they want the girls out growing into heroes or home safe and sound. Maybe they have word from a dragon or a king or a god asking for help, and one has offered to go out even though he knows neither of them misses the burdens of heroism. But mostly, if they're arguing, both of them have a tendency to want solitude after. Quil always withdrew as far as safety allowed, usually still in sight of the light of their fire. Valira would go farther, and sometimes not in human shape. “It's probably bad, but not an emergency,” he finally settles on. “They both just need to be alone sometimes.”

“So I've seen,” Iain says, and frowns in the direction of the hold before he sighs and relaxes. “Won't do any good to go back, will it?”

“Probably not,” says Kal. “Someone will tell us what's happening if it's any of our business.”

“Right.” With more determination than cheer, Iain drags the conversation around to the blight, which seems to be courtesy of some kind of mite Haoti's only seen by the coast, probably brought in a pack of seed one of them brought back from their travels, now in need of controlling, even if it means the crop has to come out. Haoti argues, as he has been, that it doesn't need to, that with Valira added in they can easily take care of the problem and prevent its spread, but Iain is firm that it will only make for weak, vermin-susceptible seed for next year, and that it's better to kill the plants well before they're ripe and buy in the vegetables and find a new source of seed for next year.

That argument, which is mostly an argument on Iain's side, since Haoti only answers one sally in three while he picks mite eggs off leaves before they can spread to other crops, lasts most of the afternoon. By then, they're sweaty and dirty and tired, and are glad to meet a brisk Prestidigitation from Allan when they arrive back at the hold.

“How's everything?” Iain asks when Allan shows signs of just wandering on. The whole hold knows that he's been working on some kind of glyph for the past few weeks, and it's made him more distracted than usual.

Allan sighs at them. “Inveterate gossips, all. Nobody's talking about it, but word has it a sparrow went flying out of Valira's window sometime after the yelling died down, so probably it didn't go terribly well.”

“They'll tell us when they're ready,” says Haoti.

“Just so,” says Allan, with a firm nod and a surprising clap on the shoulder for Haoti, and then he's off down the hall, and Iain and Haoti have nothing much to do but split up, Iain back to find Kal before going home and Haoti to his quarters.

*

Haoti takes enough dinner for two, wraps it securely in cloth, and leaves before the proper meal can be served. The only person he meets on the way out is Phi, and she's grave, wearing the carved-marble expression she did after she dealt Lennart Crestmaker his deathblow. “Are you going to find her?” Phi asks, no preamble, just nodding at his bundle.

“Hoping she'll find me,” says Haoti, and hesitates. “Quil okay? And you?”

“Quil's angry enough that I think she'd like to set something on fire on purpose, and I can't say I'm happy either, but we'll both be fine. Just worried about Valira.” Phi frowns past his shoulder, like she's looking out over the woods Valira loves. “I don't know if she'll find you,” she admits at last. “She might have gone a long way. Especially since she went flying.”

Haoti shrugs. “If she doesn't, I'll have a picnic and bring back the extra share. Being alone doesn't bother me.”

Phi's expression cracks for a moment, and he can see the exhaustion and the kind of grief that's more burnt-out rage than deep sadness, but she also lets through a thin and genuine smile before she masters herself again. “Thank you. Don't stay out too long past dark. Someone will want to come after you.”

“I'm safe enough in the dark. I have a sword.”

“Even so,” says Phi, with the finality of dismissal, but when he starts moving, she catches his arm. “I mean it. Don't wait too long. When I say she might have gone a long way, I mean she might not be back for weeks.”

Haoti blinks, trying to imagine that. They all leave sometimes—Valira to see to the sheep on the coast, even if mostly Kalon Bel surfaces to do that duty, Quil to visit her mother and try to tempt her to move nearby, Kithri gone more often than not, even Phi traveling a little at Gari's behest. But weeks, on so little notice, is unusual, and weeks alone is unthinkable. “Phi, what _happened_?”

“I think it's better coming from her,” says Phi, and releases him. “I know that's an unsatisfying answer, but they're also not my secrets. And she would say Quil and I are biased. So would Terry, for that matter.”

He can feel his eyebrows shoot up at that. “Terry disagreed with you and Quil?”

“Not in principle. But he's a little more objective about it than we are, and he says it reminded him—it doesn't matter. I just want to be sure she's okay.” She looks past him again. “I really hope she didn't go alone.”

“Me too,” says Haoti, and this time she lets him go.

*

The first owl has just called in the little clearing where Haoti has set out his food when he hears rustling in the forest growth not far away. He tenses, sword on his lap, because he's already had to defend the meal from several raccoons and one particularly bold fox.

After a moment, though, Valira appears on the other side of the clearing from him. Her hair is mussed, and her eyes are red enough that she must have been human for at least a little while. Sparrows can't cry. Haoti pushes the uneaten portion of dinner, cold by now but better than nothing, away from him, and after a moment, she sits down and starts eating.

The owl calls again.

“Phi thought you might have gone a long way.”

“She's the one who sent you?”

“I sent myself. She did catch me on the way out, but the whole hold knew there'd been an argument before you even finished having it. Kal brought the news out to the fields with lunch. You might have a look at those mites in the far field, by the way.”

“Maybe.” Valira stops eating and wraps her arms around her knees. “Phi wasn't wrong, really. I thought about just going all the way there.”

Haoti could ask where, but that's not the point. Valira can only be induced to tell stories about things that matter if she tells them backwards. She has to approach the worst parts from a distance. “What stopped you?” he asks instead.

“Because if I'd gone alone, I wouldn't have been able to do anything. They wouldn't have spoken to me.”

It's just dark enough that he's only now realizing that she's trembling, that she isn't sitting wrapped up in herself from exhaustion or for comfort, but to keep herself from shaking apart, and that maybe she's not eating more than a few bites of dinner for a reason. Haoti has had spells like that. Some before he died, when he was lucid and in control enough to realize what the succubus was doing to him. More after she brought him back. He just has no idea if she's used to them.

There's no good response to make, so Haoti pulls the food back and starts cutting it up into bite-sized portions. If she's too shaky to handle a spoon or a knife, she can still feed herself, and the few grains or bugs she might have picked up as a sparrow won't feed her now.

“I don't know why Trilli told me,” she says, and she's watching his hands, frowning, but she doesn't object to what he's doing, so he keeps doing it. “I can't do anything alone.”

“Maybe she expected you wouldn't be alone.”

“Maybe. But Quil and Phi don't understand, and even if Kithri did, she can't be gone so long.”

Whatever this is, it stretches a long way back. Before the journey, back to Valira and Trilli being cousins. He only knows flashes of their history. Before he died, Valira wasn't confiding in him, at least not about her family and her history. After, everyone already seems to know as much as she was willing to tell them. It seemed cruel and useless to ask. “Trilli had bad news for you?” he asks. It's a start, anyway.

Somehow, that seems to startle her, enough that she starts staring right at him, suddenly still. It could be an improvement, or it could be worse. “I suppose,” she says. “How much do you know?”

“That you might have left, that you and Quil were fighting and Phi probably took her side, and now, that you heard from Trilli.” She's still staring, even though it's dim enough that she can't be seeing much. “I'm guessing it has to do with your family, but I don't know anything about them. Just that Trilli is the only one you speak to.”

After a moment of silence, she reaches out and starts eating again, just with her fingers this time, and Haoti finishes cutting up the last few pieces and then sits back. “Trilli wasn't disowned,” she says, and it answers questions and asks more all at once. “She left by choice, and she can go back, though—I don't know. I think all she's killed is monsters, hunts against aggressors. If it was more, she might not be as free to return, if she's honest.” She looks up at him again. “I killed a man when I was fifteen, to save her and my other cousins. It was selfish and short-sighted and it's the only thing I could have done to make them disown me, and I did it.”

She's too smart not to see the contradiction there, so she's probably waiting for him to ask about it. “What would have happened if you didn't?” he asks instead.

Valira's mouth twists, and she eats a few bites of lamb and bread and cheese before she answers. “I don't know. Probably he wouldn't have killed the children. Men don't like to think they're that kind of monster, so they don't test themselves. He would have stolen our food. Might have forced his way to our camp before we could run and tell his army we were there, so they could all steal our food, and anyone young and strong enough to join the army. We would have hidden as soon as he left to get his fellows, disappeared into the forest, and we would have had a hard year or three while they looked for us.”

“And killing him would have led to worse consequences?”

She shrugs. “It has in the past. That's why we don't ever kill outside our group. Within it, there are trials that usually end in exile, but if you kill an outsider, you become an outsider, because if armies find out that you killed their men, they won't just steal your food and your young people. They'll take vengeance. Kill five for every one you've killed, if not more. I risked us all.”

“What kind of forest is this, that the army raids it so often?” he asks, more than a little baffled. The forests on the eastern border where he grew up are patrolled, but the people who live there are left alone, those that remain.

“We call it the Greenwoods, though I think most people call their local forests that until there's an army or a wizard around to rename them something proper. The thick woods on Tyne's southern border. The border's been pushed back and forth from one side of the woods to the other a dozen times in the past few hundred years, because both countries want the strategic advantage of the buffer. And when they run out of supplies and soldiers, whoever owns the woods at the time ...”

“They conscript anyone they can find.” It's what his father would have done. “So they disowned you so they could honestly say, if asked, that none of theirs were involved in the death, and they would be more likely to survive.”

Something eases in her face. “Exactly. You understand.”

Probably not, not the way she means him to. He can understand the why, but not the how. How could anyone look at Valira at fifteen, terrified and determined, blood on her hands and her heart, and cast her out, no matter what the rules said? “Even though you saved their children, the future of their community.”

That shutters her expression again. “You don't, then.”

“I understand their reasons. It doesn't mean I like them. What happened today, then?”

Valira is frowning, and Haoti wonders if he's lost whatever trust she came into this conversation with, but after a reluctant moment, she answers. “Trilli made a Sending. They're on a long voyage and can't get here easily, none of them have the kind of magic that lets them do it yet, and Keene is enjoying his secondhand fame and isn't as available to them as he was to us, so she can't get back, but she thinks there might be trouble.”

“She's in touch with your family?”

“Our cousin Finch, mostly. She was next oldest to me, and apparently told Trilli she'd relay any messages Trilli had to the rest of my cousins. Apparently she was surprised when that started to mean magic.” Valira stops eating and twists her hands together. It's getting darker by the moment, but he can see her knuckles go white as she clutches, trying to still the trembling. “Trilli has been Sending to her every three days, when she has the magic, and Finch hasn't answered her last three Sendings. She hasn't dared try anyone else. Something is wrong, and Trilli wants me to see what it is.”

Haoti doesn't need to force her to say more than that. He can construct her terror and her hope from there, and the likely arguments Quil and Phi were making, too. “Is Quil angry because you want to go at all, or because you want to go without her?”

She snorts, a little startled, but it's better than her looking worse than he's seen her since before he died. “Both, I think. She'd happily burn down the whole settlement in my name, given the slightest excuse, and she thinks they're not worth saving if they're in trouble. Phi agrees they deserve help, especially since my cousins weren't the ones who disowned me, but thinks we could ask someone else to go.”

“You said they won't talk to you,” he points out. “Surely if you asked Iain and Kal to go, or any of Phi's other brothers, they could deal with it, whatever it is, and report back to you.”

Valira whips a glare at him, but he just watches her. He isn't going to judge her for wanting to go home. There are parts of him that miss life at Fort Belvale, even knowing with distance how terrible most of it was. “They could,” she finally says, relenting. “And I do need company. Iain and Kal aren't a bad idea. They won't mind if I'm there as a wolf or a bird or some other animal, as I think I'll have to be. But this might be the only time I see them again. I've wondered how the children grew up, how my parents are without me. Trilli doesn't like to talk about them, wants to wash her hands of it all now that she's away.”

“I could come,” says Haoti, before he can think the better of it. Surely if she wanted him there she already would have asked, but he's not Phi or Quil or Kithri, to try to protect her from pain, and he knows her better than Iain and Kal or any of Phi's other brothers. He's a compromise. “I know forests, and I know you.”

“You're obviously a warrior,” she says, and she lets go to make a restless gesture, but talking about plans, and his easy acceptance that she's going, seems to have stopped her shaking, at least. “They might run at the sight of you, and they would certainly see you before you saw them.”

“I could leave my weapons at the edge of the forest, and leave my armor off. Whatever you think wisest. If you don't want them to know I'm connected to you, we can come up with a story. But Quil and Phi are right not to want to send you alone.”

“I know.” She picks up a piece of cheese with a steady look at him like she knows the eating will make him less worried. “It would ease my mind to have you along, but—you haven't traveled. And the last journey you went on wasn't a pleasant one. If you want to stay planted longer, or forever, you deserve that.”

Haoti shakes his head. “I can't stay here forever. Not without going out again. There are journeys I need to make, apologies I have to make—things to do, out in the world. Maybe this could be a beginning.”

“Then we'll go.” She gathers up the remaining meal into its cloth again, and stands up. “Tomorrow, probably. You might want to pack. And it's a long way, and a possible emergency, so prepare yourself, because I think we're going to be flying.”

*

They can't leave the next day. When Terry, loitering with supposed innocence in the entry hall on their return, hears Valira's clipped plan, he reacts with horror and tells her that at least they should study the situation on the southern border before they go off, to take one day to look over maps and hear gossip gathered by the hold as a whole. Valira, now that she's decided, is almost wild to go, but nobody gainsays Terry if they can help it. She nods, to his visible relief, and then tells him that she'll talk to everyone tomorrow but is going to sleep, abandoning Haoti with Terry, who pins him with a worried look.

“Is she okay?”

“No. But I think this is a better plan than any of the others we might come up with.”

“Me too. Are you okay?”

Haoti considers that for a moment. “No. But not much less so than usual, and it feels good to have a purpose. Even if such a sad one.”

“That's something, then. Take care of her, would you? Her above anyone else, no matter what she says.”

That's a hard charge. Valira doesn't like that kind of protection. If there's a chance to sacrifice her own happiness and safety for someone else's, she'll take it, and fight like a wildcat against anyone who tries to stop her. If the gods hadn't told her that only Haoti could replace Arfil in Lolth's lair, he suspects she would be there now, and the world ended, and he wonders if Yondalla lied and picked the only one among them who wouldn't sacrifice himself for Arfil in a heartbeat when they asked the question. Too much protection, and she'll end up hating him. “Always,” he says anyway. It's only the truth.

“Good,” says Terry, and clasps Haoti's forearm, warm and friendly, before he leaves him to his thoughts.

*

Quil finds Haoti not long after breakfast the next morning, and Haoti can't say he's surprised. He's not sure what conversations she's been having since last night, but she looks a little less angry than he's expecting, though the look she pins him with is still all distrust and dislike. He puts down the rations he's sorting from the hold's pantry and turns to face her and wait for her to speak. “You're going with her?”

“Yes. She needed company.”

Quil crosses her arms. “You, though?”

“I owe her. And I won't hurt them, which I think she's afraid you or Phi might.”

“They would deserve it.”

“Her parents would, and the other adults who cast her out,” he agrees, bringing her up short with surprise. “Her cousins—no, not them. And it's her cousin who might be in danger.” He sighs. “I know you have no reason to trust me, but I don't want her hurt any more than you do.”

“If she tries to talk to them, and they deny her—”

“She thinks they won't talk to her. I think she wants me to go in with her as an animal at my side.”

Quil only seems slightly appeased, but he can't blame her. For a year, she and Valira faced every danger side by side, and now, in the face of Valira's most personal troubles, she's being shut out. And she knows more than he does, has had more time to win Valira's confidences. He's sure that while he knows the facts, he doesn't know the consequences, the hurt. He can imagine them, but he doesn't know them except in how he sees them now. “You could go alone.”

“If I thought she would let me, I would.” He goes back to packing up his rations. “Where is she?”

“Shut in with Terry and Lanra and Gari. Terry and Lanra went further south in Tyne than we did on our travels, and Gari knows about the state of our borders more than anyone else does, since she has to care about politics.” After a moment, she shoulders him aside and starts briskly going through the pantry herself. “She likes the venison best, pack more of that. And take some of the dried apples, she won't eat them but she likes giving treats to the birds.”

Relieved, Haoti lets her direct him, taking out her annoyance with efficiency. It's a surprising habit of hers, one he wouldn't have guessed at on the road—when she was upset there, there wasn't anything to organize or fix. But Cordelia, on her visits, teases Quil that she fixes things just like she straightened the stock in their mother's shop when they were children, and now that Quil has settled somewhere she can build hives for her bees, she takes close care of them. “Is there anything I should know that she won't tell me?” he finally asks, when there's more than enough packed considering he and Valira are both good at foraging and hunting.

Quil turns to him, and sometime during the packing, her anger has faded back into misery. “She believes them. They raised her to believe that killing anyone would make her a monster not worthy of forgiveness, and she believes them. And the demon didn't help.”

Of course it didn't. Haoti knows that more intimately than anyone else at Fairpoint Hold. Demons don't create new horrors for your mind to visit on you. They don't need to. They take the worries you already have, the awful truths you know about yourself, and they agree. “I don't,” he says, and knows it's too little.

Still, it seems to ease something in Quil. “Bring her back as soon as you can. By force, if necessary.”

“If I tried to fight her she would have to resurrect me again,” he points out, and raises his hands at her glare. “I'll try. That's the only promise I can make.”

“Fine.”

Haoti slings the pack over his back, and the weight feels strange and familiar at once. “I care about her,” he says. It's the only thing that he thinks would comfort him, in Quil's place. “I don't want to see her hurt.”

“She will be.”

“Maybe. But she won't be alone.”

To his surprise, Quil touches his shoulder for a moment before she lets her hand drop. “I don't know why she chose you, but at least you understand it's an honor,” she says briskly, and, apparently giving up on her anger for the time being, leaves him there.

*

Leaving Fairpoint Hold on a journey is very different from leaving Fort Belvale or Seath's castle, or even Solomon's house. There are fewer resources, but with one of the most powerful women in the world at his side, he doesn't need many healing potions or magic weapons. In the place of visiting a quartermaster or a cousin trying to fix his failings with gifts, at Fairpoint Hold it's just hard to get away. For the rest of the day, everyone is full of advice.

Gari, frank and serious, takes him aside before dinner to tell him that the southern border is crumbling and Valira's family may be in the middle of another war, especially given the tarrasque damage in the south, on both sides of any nebulous border. Others load him down with armor and weapons and supplies, and Iain pulls him out to the fields to work more with their mites and gives him unnecessary advice about how to deal with the forest. Terry and Phi don't take Haoti aside like Quil did, but they watch him with undisguised worry, and Valira even more.

Fairpoint Hold is always strange and overwhelming, this family he was resurrected into that's been too polite to ask him to leave, but by the end of the day Haoti is almost dizzy with all the talking he's having to do. They're all worried about Valira and the worry translates over to him too, along with a shocking amount of relief that he's going to keep Valira company.

Through dinner, he watches Valira suffer through everyone having to have a word with her, through hugs, through Len plying her with her favorites and Gari making bad jokes and Lanra, claiming to be making up for Trilli's absence, standing up to sing a bawdy song.

He's not surprised when she knocks on his door that night. She's exhausted, shoulders low and loose, eyes shadowed. “Dawn?” she asks.

“Does anyone else know?”

“Phi and Quil will probably figure it out. I just want to be on my way.” She rolls her shoulders a little. “It should be about two days flying, and then however long it takes to track them in the woods. Quil said you'd packed food, so I didn't bother. Should the rations last us that long?”

“And back, if we supplement while we're in the forest.” He hesitates. “Quil could have fetched Trilli back to do this herself. I'm sure if you asked she would still offer.”

Valira sighs. “I want to know. I know there are plenty of options. This is just the one I want. Have you ever seen a bone that set wrong, and had to be broken again before it could heal up?”

Haoti takes her point, and from the look on her face, she probably knows it. “Dawn, then.”

“Good,” says Valira, and leaves him to get his rest.

*

Haoti wakes in the grey light before sunrise and straps on armor and weapons. In accordance with Valira's advice, he's in leathers cobbled together from Terry and Iain's sets, his mail left for when he won't need to move quickly through the forest and convince people that he's not there to hurt them. He's not used to the vulnerability that comes with leather armor and wooden shield, given to him from Valira's own kit, as opposed to the protection of metal.

He picks up his pack last. With Valira intending to fly them down and to not be human when they arrive, he's loaded himself down with all the food and supplies they'll need for the two of them, though it isn't much—rations, flint and tinder, bedroll and a tent big enough for both of them if they squeeze, and he doubts they'll need the latter much at all, both of them as good as they are at finding shelter. She has most of it in her own pack too, but he's glad to be able to access all of it, and take the weight off her mind for anything she might have forgotten.

Out at the gates of the hold, after he walks through silent hallways, Valira is saying her goodbyes to Phi and Quil. Even Terry has stayed away for this, and allowed it to be just them, though if Haoti squints, he can see Tyler, on night watch on the walls, guarding them from above. He sees Haoti see him and gives a lazy salute before fading back.

Phi turns away from Valira first, leaving Quil to say her goodbyes, and gives Haoti a tight smile. “You have everything you need?”

“More than,” he assures her, and offers his hand to let her grip his forearm, strong and steady as always. “We'll be fine, and I'm sure everyone who knows Sending will be checking in as often as possible.”

“If you don't answer, we're going to have Kithri Scry, and that's a promise.” Phi steps back just in time for Quil to do the same, reluctantly moving away from embracing Valira like maybe she could make her stay by just not letting go. Valira meets his eyes and gives him a nod, and Phi steps away from him, and he's confronted with Quil again, wondering what last-minute threats or advice she wants to make.

“Come back soon,” she says instead of any of it.

“I'll try,” he says instead of any of the things he could say, promises that aren't his to make and reassurances Quil would be offended about him trying to give, much less Valira.

Valira, by the gate, jerks her head, and Haoti allows himself one last awkward nod, watching Phi and Quil already gravitating together, taking comfort in each other as Valira leaves them. Terry, if Haoti knows him at all, is back in his and Phi's quarters, warming a pot of tea, tempting the cat out of a nap long enough to install her on someone's lap, drizzling some of Quil's own honey on some toast. Tyler, up above, will report the departure, and Phi and Quil's moods, when he comes yawning off his shift in just a few minutes, and nobody will be surprised Valira is gone by the time gossip and breakfast start traveling around the hold for the morning.

He misses them all, briefly, as he follows Valira out into the rising light. He hardly talks to most of them, but he hasn't known much else in his new life, and it's the first place he's been in either life where the people are more kind than they are anything else.

But ahead of him is Valira, who needs to not be alone for this. The wider world might feel too big and strange now, but that doesn't really matter right now, so he jogs a few steps to catch up with her, knowing they're only going to walk far enough that she can have enough clear ground to take off from.

*

Flying is incredible and terrifying at the same time. He knows he's safe, that Valira won't let him fall, but seeing the ground fly away beneath him, and then seeing it from so high, so the trees blur into moss below him, and the fields into odd little patches, is still terrifying. He's never moved so fast, either, twice as fast as a galloping horse can go, south and south with the wind in his face.

For a while, they travel with a flock of swallows who should be scared of such a large predator. But even when she's a giant eagle, Valira attracts animals. They know they can trust her, if she's not on the hunt. She's flying steadily, keeping him safe and keeping to a pace that won't exhaust her, but he enjoys watching the swallows fly loops and dive for the sheer joy of it, and he's sorry when they outpace them and have to leave them behind.

Haoti eats a lunch of bread and cheese as they fly, when she makes no sign of stopping as the noon sun shines down on them and he has to pull his hood up even if it's hot to keep his skin from burning.

It's not far into the afternoon when she starts banking, though, looking for a place to land, and sure enough, there's soon a Message in his head, a brisk _Landing soon, brace yourself_ that he only replies to in a quick affirmative, bending and tightening his grip like he's on a horse jumping a fence.

This landing, though, is much gentler than the tooth-rattling impact of a horse after a jump. They're far from the nearest village, on a forested ridge that gives way to a flattened footprint—a place the tarrasque passed through. Haoti dismounts as soon as they've landed, and hardly a second later, Valira is human again, standing there with her chest heaving, rolling her shoulders. “Give me a minute, I can do it again, the charge on the armor doing it was running out so I'll just have to draw on my magic after this.”

“We've gone as far as we need to today,” he says, and surprises himself with his own firmness, especially in the face of her scowl. “I remember from the maps. We needed to get past the river today to get to the Greenwoods the morning after tomorrow, and we passed it almost an hour ago. When's the last time you flew for so long? You must be aching, and magical healing isn't a substitute for rest.”

“What if I'm too late?”

“If you're too late, you'll be too late by well over a day, if Trilli waited several days before Sending to you. If you're going to arrive in the aftermath, best to arrive awake. And,” he adds pointedly as she absently rubs her shoulder, “not in pain. Rest. I'll make you something to eat.”

Valira doesn't look happy, but she sits and lets him pull out some rations. He suspects she'll be asleep by supper, so he starts a fire over her grumbling and cooks a few things up, instead of giving her cold rations and handing her a bowl of something hot and savory that she devours in minutes even though it must burn her tongue. While she eats, he sets up the tent in the shadow of a boulder where the afternoon sun is blocked enough to let someone sensitive to light sleep, and as soon as she's done, he hands her bedroll to her and nods at it. “I'm not a child,” she says, mustering a coherent objection even though she's slumping more by the minute.

“No child could fly for nearly eight solid hours carrying a heavy load,” he agrees. “You haven't flown so far since the journey, right?”

She frowns, but she sets to work unrolling her bedroll on the left side of the tent, leaving enough space that he can join later, though he's got hours of being awake left in front of him. “Once. After Trilli found me. Flying helps me think, and I needed to think.”

Haoti was still dead then, though not for much longer. He knows so little about the nearly two seasons that passed between Seath's death and his resurrection, while Valira wrestled with what Solomon had told her and what she knew about him, but he does know that her cousin and Quil's sister arriving all at once, only weeks after they killed Seath, was a shock. “Well. It's still been a while. Get some sleep. I'll wake you if you're needed.”

It's a testament to how tired she is that she lets that convince her, going into the tent and rolling into the wall, on top of the blankets with the afternoon warmth making up for them. Minutes later, he can hear her breathing change.

If there's one thing that he's learned in his time, it's how to keep himself occupied when there isn't really much to do. Seath's missions were long periods of boredom punctuated by brief periods of horrible violence, and he didn't get along well with his companions, so he'd let them talk to each other while he wrote reports that were longer than necessary, or memorized orders or letters or the rare book or scroll he found, or tended to his gear. Today, he takes out a needle and thread and tries to force armor made for two different men to fit him a little better. He's no great hand at sewing, only knows enough to mend what he tears, but the pauldrons sit a little easier on his shoulders by the time he starts getting hungry again, and that's good enough.

Valira doesn't wake, not when he warms up what's left of what he made her when they stopped and eats it himself, not when he sets aside some jerky and bread and cheese in a cloth for her to eat when she does wake. He would be worried if he couldn't hear her breath, deep and steady, in the tent at his back.

After waking at dawn and being battered by wind for half the day, Haoti is tired too, and it's not much after dark when he gives up on staying awake and banks the fire, protects their supplies from any passing wildlife, and ponders where to sleep. He doesn't like to presume a place next to Valira even if she left him one, and just as much, he knows that if she wakes and finds him out under the stars, she'll be upset, even though it's a clear night, not too cold, and watching the stars doesn't sound bad.

In the end, since she's been asleep for so long, he doesn't mind too much that halfway through laying out his bed, she gasps and her eyes fly open. “Haoti? How long was I asleep? We should leave again.”

“Eagles can't see in the dark, and a while. We'll leave in the morning again. Though I'd ask your mercy not to go right at dawn.” She yawns, and so does he. “Go back to sleep.”

“It's dark. I've already slept half the day. I can keep watch.”

Haoti shakes his head. “No need. It's safer out here than it ever was while you were traveling. And we'll wake if there's a bear.”

“You say that now, and then you wake up with a fucking bear inches from your nose,” she says muzzily, but she's already falling asleep again.

“I'll ask you about that in the morning,” he says, and she just mumbles a few things as she falls asleep, and a few more when Haoti assesses the nighttime chill and pulls a blanket over her before he gets under his own.

*

When Haoti wakes, Valira is awake too, and there's enough light that it must be past dawn. “Any bears?” he asks, and only gets an absent smile for it. He wasn't really expecting the story, when she wants so badly to be finding out what's wrong with her cousin, but he still wishes he could hear it. “How long have you been awake?”

“A while. Don't let me sleep so soon today, if you can.” Like she was waiting for him, she levers herself up and starts rolling up her bedroll, and Haoti groans and does the same. “I'm starving, so I'll need plenty to eat, but then get ready for another long flight.”

“I left some food out for you last night. Should have said, when you woke.”

“Fuck, you should have,” she says, and then she's scrambling out of the tent and into the morning light, bedroll half rolled. Haoti smiles to himself and packs both of them up while she starts eating, and comes out to get his own breakfast and hand over her portion, a special treat of hand pies that Quil made sure he had packed for their first breakfast, however impractical they were to pack. “Thank you,” she says through a full mouth.

“Phi's estimate is that we'd get to the lakeshore near the Greenwoods tonight,” he says when they've both had time to eat. “Still sound right?”

“We'll be right on the border, I think. Depending on the wind, we might get into it, though we're not going quite in a straight line—I'm planning to enter a place where there's easy access to a cave I know that we can use as a base of operations.”

Haoti picks up a stick to prod at the ashes of last night's fire. “You're going to have to tell me a few things before we get there, you know.”

“I know. But today, I need to be thinking about flying. I feel better today. What about you? Sore? I know it's a lot of holding still.”

Haoti shrugs. “It's not so bad. I have a book in my pack. Maybe I'll see if I can read and fly at the same time.”

Valira blinks at him. “You do? What for?”

“It's poetry, Tomas brought it back for Ronan after his last trip to the city, and Ronan knows I follow the poet, so he passed it on to read on this trip.” Valira is staring at him, and he looks away, self-conscious. “I like it.”

“Poetry,” she says, and she sounds baffled but not anything worse. “Well, if you like it, I hope it keeps you from being bored.”

“The scenery should do it well enough, but it doesn't hurt having options.”

After a second where he keeps looking at the remains of the fire instead of her, Valira stands up, and sighs. “Come on, we should go. There are plenty of travelers in this area, and if any are coming through this way today, I don't want to meet them.”

*

Even flying, as exhilarating and noisy as it is, can get dull, and after an hour, Haoti does take out his book, propping it on the feathers in front of him and reading it carefully, line by line, frequently distracted by the way the beat of Valira's wings makes the pages rattle in the wind.

 _Are you reading?_ she asks through a Message a while on, shocking him after a silent ride the day before, and when he says he is, she sends another: _What does it say, then?_

Haoti, stunned for a second, almost lets the connection lapse before he scrambles to look back at the page he's reading. _This one is called “High Tide,” and it's about collecting shells and also about politics. Written before Seath died._

_Read it to me,_ she requests, and when he finishes the first twenty-five words of it and expects her to thank him and dismiss it, instead she says _Keep going_ , and does it again and again until the poem is over and he's learned the tricks of it, breaking after a line or two instead of counting the words laboriously out. And then she requests the next, about mayflies and dragons, clearly a response to the king's death, and before he knows it, he's read her five poems and hours have passed, and the next time she says _Keep going_ he refuses.

_I'll run out. Tell me what you think instead,_ he says, and is treated to her grumpy summations of it all, hampered by the limits on the words they can send.

That's a more frustrating conversation than either of them wants to deal with, so they fall silent, and Haoti enjoys the flight as they head farther and farther south, until he can see the great green expanse of a forest the size of a sea. She keeps flying, and it's hard to tell, but he thinks she's going even faster at the sight of their goal, but even her determination can't outlast the limits of her body, and it's mid-afternoon when she banks to avoid a village and lands in what seems like the last clear meadow before the forest begins.

Valira eyes the trees with satisfaction as soon as she's human again. “I knew we could make it. And a few hours more hiking will get us to that cave.”

“We have a while before dark,” Haoti says. “Sit. Eat something. Tell me precisely what your problem with Greenarrow's use of metaphor is.”

She may be proposing hours more of hiking, but she sits right where she landed. “Fine, I'll eat. Don't try to make me sleep again, this isn't a good place to bunk down for the night, or even for very long, the villagers come here often enough.”

“You know the field?”

“I know the village. The druid who trained me lived there before she died.”

Haoti isn't a fool. If Valira wanted to speak to anyone else she might know from her time in the village, she would be doing it. If it felt like a home, she would be living there, or visiting it more often. But Valira talks like she didn't exist before Seath's message found her, and that means this place isn't a happy one for her, and he doesn't need to know much more than that. “Good to know. Is there a gravesite you'd like to visit?”

That seems to startle her. “Probably not. The grave isn't her.” She gazes in the direction the village must be. “They were kind enough people. They didn't understand me and I didn't understand them, but that's not anyone's fault. Just means I don't have friends to visit, and don't want acquaintances to stare. Especially if my name has filtered this far south.”

“Fair enough.” He starts pulling out rations. If this meadow is used often, he's not going to clear a space for fire that they might be planning to scythe for hay, so they'll have to eat cold, and see if they can manage a warm dinner depending on where they camp. “You still haven't explained your points about Greenarrow, though. Poetry is all about metaphor.”

Valira's glower says his distraction is transparent, but she gamely starts arguing with him about why poets can't say what they mean. By the end of their meal, she's ceded that Greenarrow couldn't very well speak out openly against Seath while he was still alive and expect to survive and he's ceded that trying to connect the natural world and politics doesn't always work, at least not the way Greenarrow is doing it. “We should go,” she says when they fall into a natural silence. “Just some walking. You must be sore after all that sitting, and I'm sore after all that flying. No use sitting around getting stiff.”

Haoti heaves himself to his feet, and is surprised by how stiff he isn't. He is sore, all over, but Valira's resurrection erased some old wounds in his hip and knee that always stiffened up first when he'd pushed too hard. “Sure you have the energy?”

“I let you coddle me yesterday, I won't again today.” She shoulders her pack. “We shouldn't meet them today unless they're ranging in very different parts of the forest now, and they weren't when Trilli left them, so they shouldn't be now. Unless the war Gari warns me is coming here has already arrived.”

The forest may be Valira's home base and area of expertise, but Haoti knows armies, and he knows that if war had arrived, this quiet field would be trampled over by horses and soldiers, that the roads they saw from above would have been mud where they weren't dust. “If there's a war, it's not on this side of the forest yet. If there are battles, they won't be in the forest, they're terrible places for pitched battles. But Gari wasn't even sure diplomacy had failed.”

“If the war has reached them ...”

“We'll do something about it. Or you will. If they know Seath is dead to try to take this land, they know your name.”

That's not quite the right answer, or maybe is the answer to the wrong trailed-off end of that assumption, but Valira doesn't correct him, just shrugs a little and starts walking, and Haoti follows, and doesn't bother asking.

*

When Valira keeps pushing long after her first yawn, he doesn't object. They've long since left behind the new growth forest and gone deep into the old. In the forest by Fort Belvale, when he was allowed to push into it as his training continued, there were massive old trees, too big to wrap his arms around, too tall to see the tops of, and if it weren't for the ferns and shrubs and mushrooms at their feet, it would have given the impression of being frozen in time. This forest is obviously old, but that's what he can see from the layers upon layers of mast on the ground, of generations of trees alive and dead and decaying, of the fallen trees in the process of doing that and the new ones springing up around them.

Valira can't have been back in years, from what he's picked up, but every step is sure, and he follows in her wake and knows he'll be hopelessly lost trying to get back, that he's trusting her too much and not paying close enough attention to where they're going. He barely notices the slope of the ground until he realizes they're skirting around the side of a hill that overlooks a brook until she stops, puts her pack down, and starts briskly pushing undergrowth and a large stone or three out of the way until the hill reveals a secret: what must once have been a bear's den, before human hands covered it over.

“This is our base,” says Valira, and turns around, standing in front of the opening. “It's where—I don't remember if I left anything, so I may as well tell you. It's where I came after I killed that man. Or where I found, anyway, I didn't know it was there before. I spent most of a year here.”

“Good to know,” he says, trying to be neutral, because this is what she wants from him. She doesn't want him to rage on her behalf, or weep for her younger self. This is why she chose him over anyone else. “I assume you poked a chimney through, so maybe it will be easy to do and we won't get too much smoke in our noses.”

“I plugged it when I left, I do remember that.” She ducks and crawls in, and after a moment to let her get clear of the door, Haoti follows.

It's a small base, for two. It's a small base for one, really, at least to stay a year, though it would be a comfortable den for a night or three. It's the size of a small room, all hollowed out dirt, with enough space for a fire and their bedrolls and not much more. Up against the back wall, there's a small pile of filthy, mostly-broken items, and there are signs that a few rats and raccoons have used the place in the past decade. The roof, such as it is, does have a bundle of sticks poking out of it, stoppering what used to be the chimney.

Valira is crouching across the space, already easy in it, going to inspect the pile—a broken bowl, a decaying leather pouch that contains nothing but dust, and a few other things, nothing of use but the sign of a life that was here once.

“You were smart to find this place,” he says, mostly for something to say, and starts trying to get the chimney open again even though he knows it's going to drop a decade of leaf rot into their floor to be swept out.

“Lucky,” she corrects. “I was hardly thinking back then. Luckily, the bears had only recently abandoned it, so the opening was obvious.” Valira turns to face him and sits back on her heels, watching impassively as he gets the plug out and predictably gets dirt dumped on his head, and old leaves, and one very surprised frog that he prods out the door while she decides what she's going to say. He's starting to sweep the dirt out when she speaks again. “You aren't going to like this.”

He doesn't like any of it already, imagining her in this safe but lonely place for most of a year, only to go to a druid who trained her and then died, leaving her friendless for too long. Doesn't like wondering how far she was from her family in that year, and how much she must have missed them, and wonders if it's anything like how much he missed his mother when she left, or how terrified he was when his father sent him off with a company of men to a border dispute when he was still far too young to fight, let alone command. “What is it?”

“If we go hunting them together, with me in any form, if we find them, it will be a long time. I know you're a good tracker, but it's a dense forest and there's only so much ground we can cover. I'm going to be a hawk and look for signs, and I can't do that with you.”

“You know Polymorph,” he points out, though he knows it's not the same, that he won't keep the sharpness of his mind the way she does as a druid and that he's more of a liability than anything else. Valira sees those thoughts pass through his mind, judging from her expression, and he sighs and relents. “Fine. You're lucky it's me with you, Quil or Phi wouldn't allow that. Your word, though. You won't torture yourself by getting too close. You'll just find them, and come back to me.”

“I'll agree to that,” she says, and to his relief there isn't even any reluctance in it.

“And you start tomorrow,” he adds, squinting outside at what light remains. “You flew half the day, and then walked for hours. You need rest.”

Valira sighs. “I know. And we need to talk a little in the morning anyway. I'll cook, if you like.”

“You finish cleaning this up and I'll cook,” Haoti offers, gesturing at the mess of the chimney plug, half because he doesn't want to get even dirtier and half because Valira doesn't have any particular talent for cooking. “Is the water from the brook clean?”

“Used to be, but it's best to be safe. I can clean it,” she says, and then they're both moving, going about the necessary motions of setting up a camp, starting a fire and bringing in water, debating how to shut themselves in safely at night, and generally taking care of their needs without talking much about the morning.

They set up their beds early by mutual silent agreement, banking the fire and setting up on either side of the embers, since there's not really space to do anything else. Haoti, tired but not as much as Valira is, since he didn't fly most of the day away, lays awake for longer than he should, listening to the muffled sounds of the forest, and much closer, Valira's steady breathing as she sleeps.

*

Haoti wakes first in the morning, when the early light slants through the chimney hole at just the perfect angle to get in his eyes. He stays where he is for a while, because Valira deserves her rest and the den is small enough that getting up will wake her, but nature calls eventually, and she won't want to sleep too much, so he levers himself out of his blankets and listens to her groan herself awake behind him as he crawls out into the morning.

By the time he comes back, she's eating bread and cheese sitting up in her bedroll, scowling at the light filtering in through the chimney. “You'll be fine here today?” she asks.

Haoti shrugs. “I'll read some Greenarrow. Maybe make a rabbit snare. Explore the immediate surroundings. I'm more worried about you.”

“I can defend myself.”

From everyone but her family, but that's another thing he shouldn't say, another reason she chose him to come. “I know,” he says instead. “But you know why I'm worried.”

“I do. I'm sorry.” She starts crawling out of her bedroll, still eating with one hand, and then stops to rummage in her pack for a few things. “I'll be out of range for Message, and I don't know how to Send. If I'm not back by sunset, I'm in trouble.”

“Which direction are you flying?”

“Southeast first—definitely east, and almost certainly south, depends on where the resources are right now, but they rarely come this north or this west, so that seems like the direction to choose.” She puts down her food and finds a bare patch of dirt on the floor of their den, where she sketches out an irregular shape that must be the forest, making a mark where they are, and then shading in another range of area. It's dauntingly large. “Those are the lands in regular rotation, or at least that were ten years ago, and Trilli confirms they're still on the traditional routes.”

“It may take a while to search. You're sure you don't want to try Polymorph for me?”

“I'm sure. If you had a week to practice balancing a bird's mind with your own, you'd be helpful, but you don't.”

Haoti nods. “I'll have something hot ready for sundown. You'll be hungry after a third day of flying.”

“Thank you,” she says, and then it's quiet for a few minutes as she eats and changes, snorting a little when he turns away automatically to offer her modesty but not commenting on it. “No use putting it off,” she says when she's done. “Watch the brook, the rocks are slick. And don't range too far, hunters from the village sometimes make it in this far, and they don't have my family's compunctions about not hurting strangers.”

“I'll be safe,” he promises.

One side of her mouth tugs up. “And so will I. I'll see you before sundown, Haoti.”

And with that and a blur of limbs and feathers, she's a hawk, and expertly dodging out the entrance of the den before flying up and away, out of sight before he can even scramble to look and see where she's going.

For all his worries about Valira, at least Haoti has the blessing of liking to be alone, and especially liking to be alone in the woods. He goes down to the brook and washes their clothes from the past few days, and finds a good crop of mushrooms that make setting up a snare unnecessary before going back to the den to try to clean it out a little better and set up a better fire pit than the one that's survived ten years.

Around noon, Allan's voice rings in his head with a wry _Valira just told me she's fine but Quil wants a better answer. Is she?_

Haoti takes a moment to collect an answer that's true and won't betray more than Valira would want him to. _Probably not,_ he finally says, _but she's safe and searching for them in the forest, and promised she wouldn't talk to them without me._

It can't be a satisfying answer, but Allan doesn't ask any more, so either he's past his ability to cast the spell or he's convinced Quil to leave further questions for later.

The afternoon goes slow, and Haoti finishes the volume of poetry and wishes he'd thought to pack more books. He starts rereading it instead, committing one of the shorter ones to memory and reciting it out loud to a very unimpressed squirrel in a nearby tree to solidify it.

By the time Valira comes, he's starting to worry—the sun isn't setting yet, but it's low, well out of sight behind the trees, all the shadows long and deep, the blue starting to fade from the sky. He's making dinner, but he's going to the door of the den every few minutes to peer out waiting for her, but she shows up, anticlimactically, while he's busy making sure the mushrooms don't burn. One moment she's still gone, and the next, there's a rustle of wings and then Valira, human as ever, crawling in the den door, clearly exhausted after a third day of flying.

“Find them?” he asks, to spare them both the wait.

“Yes. They're most of a day's hike, so we'll have a long day tomorrow and probably won't be staying here again until we've dealt with whatever is happening. I didn't fly low enough to know any more than that.” She settles with her back against the den wall and looks at him. “We should talk about what you're going to say to them. And how to introduce yourself.”

“I thought I would just say Trilli sent me. It's close enough to true.”

Valira frowns, tapping her fingers against her knee while she thinks about it. “Trilli refuses to tell me much about the way she took her leave from the family, but I don't think it was on the best of terms. She's not disowned, but I don't know if they'll automatically trust anyone she sent. Well, maybe Finch, if she's okay, but I don't want to rely on that introduction. Luckily, you're a paladin of Obad-hai.”

“Why is that lucky?”

“Because family tradition has it that his first temple was in this forest, a thousand and more years ago, and you can say you're on a pilgrimage to find it. It's a reason for a warrior to be in their forest without wanting to hurt them, so it's the best assumption to let them make.”

“Even if Trilli was checking they aren't in danger, they would still mistrust me?”

“If they thought she'd sent you to kill their enemies? It would burn her bridges, and they would send you away too.”

He could very easily hate these people, and all he can hope is that some of them are better than she expects them to be, less rigid than they appear. That Trilli isn't the only cousin who remembers her killing a man to save them. “Then I'll tell them I'm a pilgrim. How should I approach, then?”

“Without a weapon in your hand, and telling them you mean them no harm—swear on Obad-hai, if you're comfortable doing it, or on something else precious.”

Haoti nods. “I can do that. You'll be in animal form—with me, I hope? I'd rather that than you in the woods watching.”

“With you. I want to hear everything.” She closes her eyes for a moment. “Probably as a wolf. Three days in a row of flying constantly is a bit too much, I'd rather have my feet on the ground.”

“You'll be more independent, too,” he points out. “Birds are usually on a branch or their handler's arm. A wolf has a little more freedom, especially a tame one.” Valira looks miserable and exhausted, and before she can respond, Haoti clears his throat. “Dinner's almost ready, but the canteens could use refilling, if you don't mind.”

“Not at all,” she says, groaning as she straightens enough that he feels a little guilty asking her to move when she just admitted that she's sore, but before he can retract the request, she puts her hand on his arm and squeezes. “Thank you, Haoti.”

Haoti shakes his head. “I'm hardly doing anything at all.”

Valira shakes her own head in response, but she doesn't say anything else, just squeezes his arm again and goes to refill their canteens.

*

Their hike the next day is quiet. Valira leads the way, her shoulders tight, almost without turning, except when she offers to stop to let him rest or eat. He always takes her up on it, because he can tell she's still sore but she turned down his offer of a healing so he can't do anything about it. At least he can give her the excuse of taking care of him to let her rest.

“We're getting to the area where the scouts and hunters might be out,” she finally says sometime in the afternoon. “I'll be a wolf, but I'll still understand you, and I can still send a Message if there's something I think you should do or not do.”

Haoti considers the hundred questions he could ask that he should have thought of before—whether he should accept hospitality if it's offered, how to ask about Finch without them growing suspicious, what to do if they don't believe he's a pilgrim. But she can tell him all that in a Message, so there's no reason to stall her. “Tell me if you hear something I don't, your ears will be sharper, and your nose too,” he says instead, and she gives him a relieved nod and then she's a wolf.

The walk is even quieter when she's leading him as a wolf rather than as a woman. She's clearly on the trail of a scent, and he lets her lead him. “What should I call you?” he asks after a while. “Your name will be a little obvious. Though Wayfinder isn't their name, is it? I could use that.”

_Greenarrow,_ she says after a thoughtful silence. After your poet.

Haoti laughs and shows off the memorization he's working on. Midway through, she stops, he thinks to let him catch up, and it's only when he finishes the last line with a flourish that he realizes she's too tense to be feeling companionable, and that only gives him a few seconds on guard before a man steps out of the trees. He's about Haoti's age, sun-brown, with Valira's brown hair and leathers many times mended, and at the sight of him, Valira lets out a little whine. Haoti, her advice in his mind, raises his hands slowly. This man won't kill him, but he's mistrustful, maybe frightened, and must have been close enough that his flight would have drawn the notice of an enemy. “Peace, friend,” says Haoti, defaulting to his mother's address of strangers who had the misfortune of finding Fort Belvale when they were in need of healing or resupply. “I mean no harm.”

“And who are you to call me a friend?”

“A pilgrim,” he says, and it doesn't sit honestly on his shoulders, so he adds, searching for a true enough lie, “I'm a paladin of Obad-hai, and I owe him for what he's given me that I don't deserve. I'm here to try to pay that debt. All I'll harm in this forest is what I need to stay alive.” He puts his hand gently on Valira's ruff. “And I swear that on her life.”

The stranger relaxes, just slightly, at that. “And what brings you on a pilgrimage to this forest in particular?”

“Rumors of the first temple. I don't know if I'll find it, but it's clear these woods are sacred.” Now that this man—a cousin, at a guess, which gives him more hope than if the man were older—trusts him a little, he feels more comfortable lying. “I was thinking of setting up camp soon. You're welcome to share my fire, and my rations. I'm Haoti, and this is Greenarrow.”

After another moment of squinting mistrust, he unbends a little more. “And I'm Rowan, and I have no need of your fire, but I think my family would scold me for weeks if I didn't bring a pilgrim to take our hospitality. It's not often we see friendly strangers. You've chosen a dark time to visit.”

“It's a dangerous border,” Haoti agrees. “But I'll take your kind hospitality for the night, and add my rations to yours.”

“It's been a while since we made a trading trip out of the forest. You can pay us with news. Looks like you're coming from the north, and Tyne, and on our last trip we heard rumors we could hardly believe.”

“I'm happy to share what I can,” says Haoti, and when Rowan starts walking, he falls in behind him, at a far enough distance that Rowan would hear him taking out a weapon in plenty of time to dodge or counter.

It's not a far walk to the settlement, just twenty minutes at a good pace, and they walk out of forest indistinguishable from any other part into a small village built between trees, temporary structures that are nonetheless strong, with a central fire in the biggest clearing, and a few people out—one fletching arrows, a few more putting up food, another with a drop spindle. It's a quiet but friendly sort of busyness until one of them looks up at Rowan's arrival and sees Haoti behind him, an older woman. “And who's this?” she asks.

“A guest,” says Rowan. “He claims peace and pilgrimage, and offers to share his supplies.”

There are mistrustful glances around the fire, and Haoti doesn't dare look at Valira, who is leaning against his side, but he wants to. “I'll harm none,” he says.

“Then you can join us,” says the older woman, with at least an attempt at grace, and nods at a rock by the central fire. “We'll decide among us whose house can stand a guest tonight.”

“I can camp elsewhere,” he offers, even if that won't help him, and sits down as he does, unbuckling his sword belt and putting it behind the rock where it's hard to reach. A young woman who's watching him in between receiving a kiss on the cheek from Rowan, darker-haired than most of them and with a child leaning against her leg, relaxes a little when he does, so it's probably the right choice. Valira sits next to him, on alert. “My name is Haoti.”

That doesn't get him much—a few muttered names, and Rowan's more polite introduction of the woman he kissed as his wife Sella and the child at her side as his son Ash. When after that they all seem inclined to ignore him, not sure what to do with a peaceful stranger, Haoti takes out some jerky and offers it to Valira, who takes it, and then takes out a few things for the communal soup pot, since that's what seems to be cooking, including a packet of salt likely to be precious this far into the forest.

As the day winds to a close, more and more people arrive, coming out of houses and the forest, news clearly spreading quickly that there's a guest, and Haoti gives everyone who comes near him a mild greeting and keeps a hand on Valira's ruff, waiting to see whose presence hurts her most. There are, all told, something like fifty people—Valira told him, as they walked, that between marrying in and marrying out, there are rarely less and rarely more. The younger people all seem more likely to trust him, settling in nearest him, and the older all watch him in a huddle from across the fire.

If he focuses on the elders, he's going to try to find Valira's parents, look for the eyes and the noses that seem most like hers, and hate them. That's not what she wants, though her fixed gaze through the fire's smoke says they're there. Instead, he looks at the young people, her cousins. They're all strong and tall and smart, and while their parents don't seem to carry weapons in the camp, a few of them have daggers or bows still at their sides. That's interesting, and he doesn't know if Valira's seen it yet.

The very youngest stay with their parents, as Ash does with Rowan and Sella, but it's the youngest of those not doing so who finally asks Haoti a question, when soup has been shared around and well salted. He's about fourteen, soft-voiced, and his hand strays often to his side like he's still not used to the weight of daggers. “Rowan says you came from Tyne. What's the news?”

“There's a lot of it, depending on what you last heard.”

“Rumors and whispers,” says Sella. “Is it true the king is dead?”

Seath has been dead for most of a year. These people truly are isolated. “Yes. Seath is dead. He was a dragon, and his plans for the world were more horror than anyone deserved, and he worked with Lolth the Betrayer to break her chains, but she's been banished again.”

“How did it come to that?” asks a young woman a little older than Trilli, with her light hair and freckles but with a much more serious face. A sister, likely. He'll have to ask Valira who is who, and who are siblings rather than cousins.

Haoti tells the story the same way any well-informed traveler might, sticking to the political picture more than the woman who did it, and leaving out his place in it. He talks about betrayal, and dragons, and a tarrasque, and the state of Tyne, which is still in disarray, not having had to deal with a real transition of power in centuries.

“And the border?” Rowan asks when he finishes.

Haoti shrugs. “From the north, no sign of coming conflict. I haven't been south. I wouldn't say you're safe—as soon as a believable enough version of the story starts spreading, people will test the border—but I haven't seen any evidence yet.”

“Thank you for the warning,” says a young man. He's sitting with Valira's cousins, but he doesn't look anything like them. He must have married in, but Haoti has no way of guessing who he married, since he isn't sitting particularly close to anyone. “And what's your story, Haoti?”

Haoti prods Valira a little where she's alert at his side, and she takes his point, and sends a terse _Don't lie_. “I fought for Seath too long after I realized it was the wrong thing to do, and the women who killed him saved me. I died and one of them brought me back.”

That spreads murmurs all around the campfire, and anyone who pretended to ignore him is now watching him. There aren't many resurrections in the world, though Valira has been changing that. It's rare to meet someone who's been brought back. “Why, if you fought against them?” asks another young woman who's been whittling as he spoke.

“They wanted me to be better than I was, and before I died, I suppose I was trying to be. Now I'm definitely trying to be.”

“You knew them well, then,” says the youngest cousin again. “What are they like? Is one queen now?”

Haoti laughs because he can't help it, at all the offers and all the horrified refusals that he's witnessed even since he was brought back. He's told it happened much more often in the first months. “No, no queens among them. They're living quiet lives now.” He prods Valira again, but this time she has no answers for him, so all he can assume is that he still shouldn't lie. That doesn't mean, though, that he's going to tell the whole truth. He spins tales of Kithri and Phi and Quil, and refers to Valira only and dramatically as “The Wayfinder” because he suspects her name will ruin this tentative peace. He talks about lives saved and lives lost, and lets them draw their own conclusions.

“Heroes indeed,” says Sella when he trails off, and there are some hums of agreement, even among the elders.

Haoti finds himself unexpectedly angry at that. It's clear they can admit some deaths are necessary, that the job might be messy and unpleasant but that some people can't be allowed to hurt others and that sometimes the only way to stop them is with a sword. They can call Valira and her companions heroes, but the moment they know her name, they're likely to turn on him, and change their minds. “They are,” he says. “They had to make hard choices, but they prevented untold harm.”

“Thank you for the news,” says one of the young women, with a puzzled look that says that might have been a little too impassioned. “If you plan to stay a day or two, we'll ask more stories.”

“I don't know my plans yet. I have searching to do, after all. But I'll be glad to stay the night, at least.”

“We'll have to decide where to send him,” says one of the elders briskly, a woman with grey streaks in her brown hair and whose tilt of the head and pursed lips he knows too well. It must be Valira's mother, and he almost speaks up to say he doesn't want to stay with her, because it will break Valira's heart to stay in her parents' house as a wolf.

Before he can, though, in response to Valira stiffening at his side, the young man who doesn't look like the others speaks up. “We'll take him. We've got the space these days.”

There's a small tumult of objection at that, and among it, Haoti picks the word “Finch” out several times, until he can focus in on Rowan, chiding, saying “Finch is still recovering, Ker. Are you sure it won't be a burden?”

Haoti doesn't need Valira's sudden interest and the half-garbled Message she gets through in her shock to know his answer to that. “If there's a household that needs help, with a member recovering, I'd rather be a help than a guest.”

“See?” says Ker. “He's helpful. And Finch is bored of sitting inside, she'll make him tell the stories again.” He eyes Haoti, and Valira at his side. “The wolf sleeps inside?”

“She does,” Haoti says, unwilling to budge on that even if he suspects Valira would be just as happy sent to sleep in the woods, to return to a whistle in the morning. “Knows her manners, though.”

“We'll see what Finch says,” he says, and stands up. “They'll be missing me in there. Come on, Haoti, I know it's early for a traveler still, but you must have had a long day of walking.”

Haoti won't turn down the opportunity to solve the mystery they came here for. Finch is alive and well, at least, if recovering from some mysterious ailment or injury, but there's no knowing why she hasn't responded to Trilli's Sendings if she's fine. He stands up, and collects his sword again, watching the way the elders tense and Valira's cousins don't. There's a change between the generations, and judging by Trilli, he suspects Valira is the core of it. “I won't say no to a place to rest my head.”

Ker gives him a friendly clap on the shoulder and leads him away to a structure on the outskirts of the camp, one of the newer huts, if he's a judge, though it's hard to tell when they all seem to be collapsed and taken from place to place like unwieldy tents.

Inside, it's dark except for the firelight from the center, and it's a round, squat building, all one room, though larger than his and Valira's den. There's little by way of furniture, other than a cot for two against a wall, and at its foot, a crib. On the cot is a young woman, a little older than most of the other cousins and certainly older than Trilli, but younger than Valira, with her hair cropped short and a baby on her lap, no more than two weeks old.

Valira lets out a whine when she sees what he does, and Haoti rests a hand on her head automatically, wishing he could speak to comfort. It's one thing to see Rowan, older than she is, with a child that Trilli must have mentioned, from his age. It's another to see Finch, younger and much-loved, with a baby. “It's all right,” he says, mostly for something to say.

“I offered to host our guest,” says Ker. “They almost didn't let me, but he said he'd help. Plus he's got stories about the saviors of the world. Mind waking in the night if she starts crying, Haoti?”

“No, though you might need to tell me what to do.” He clears his throat and thinks of how Valira loves children, how she plays with the babies in the town near Fairpoint Hold whenever she has the excuse, and how much it must be hurting her now not to reach out for her. “What's her name?”

Finch smiles down at her lap, and then looks up at him. “Valerian.” Valira makes a low, wounded noise, and Haoti must flinch, because her eyes narrow, and then she nods. “My mother and her siblings have arguments about whether it's best to use the proper plant or bird or whether to change it a little. I went my mother's way instead of my aunt's, but I think none of them want me to have chosen this plant. Which one of them sent you?”

Valira told him not to lie, but he should have, he thinks. Trilli Sends to Finch, who tells the others what she knows, and she must have told them that Valira saved the world, and now he's claimed to know the saviors of the world. “Valira,” he says, because she's still frozen next to him. “Trilli is far away, and she terrified Valira by telling her you weren't answering.”

She trails her fingers over her daughter's head. “I regret that. It was a hard birth, and I slept for a few days after. And since, I haven't known what to say. She didn't know I was pregnant. Telling her in so few words ...”

“Next time she tries, you need to tell her. Or I will. She's terrified for you.”

“And Valira?”

“She'll want to know too,” he says. Next to him, she's almost shaking. “And she may want to know why your daughter is named after her when your family didn't want her anymore.”

Finch flinches, and Ker goes to sit next to her, his hand on her shoulder. “You do know her well,” she says, and lifts her chin. “But maybe not Trilli. There's been a rift, these past few years. Among those of us who remember her saving our lives, and those who think it's better to die than kill. Us, and our parents.”

“Who has the power?” he asks, and knows it's a cold and pragmatic question, but it's the kind he was raised to ask, and it's an answer Valira needs.

“Some days one, some days the other. But they know war is coming, and you've just confirmed it. They might have held to their principles for one scout in peacetime, but a whole army in war?” Finch offers him a tight, mirthless smile. “We're holding ourselves hostage, really. We've as good as told them that we'll defend ourselves, and if they disagree, they'll find their children gone.”

“Can't make for warm family relations,” he observes. Valira must be feeling agonies over all of this. She's been sent into exile, and thought all these years that at least she was protecting her cousins from her sins, and all this time, they've been miserable, the young rising up against the cruelty of those older.

“It's been difficult,” says Ker. “Especially since Trilli went off. Andula and Robin almost went with her, but we all love this forest. We'd rather stay and change things.” He gives Finch a fond smile that she ignores, watching Haoti and Valira. “Even those of us who chose this life, instead of being born into it.”

“Some of them agree with us, I think,” says Finch, more comfortingly, answering her husband's optimism with the kind of cool assessment he recognizes from the battlefield. “Trilli and Andula's mother. Mine and Wren's father. Both Robin's parents.” She looks at Valira, and Haoti wonders if she's guessed. It's not a difficult guess. “And there are others who I think would agree with us if it wouldn't kill them to realize they did wrong.”

That must be as good as a knife in the chest, but Valira only stands there, her head lowered, more scolded dog than proud wolf. “If they can't admit it, they can't try to make amends.”

“Could they ever?”

Valira is a better woman than her parents deserve. One word, and she'll forgive them. She might never trust them again, and he doesn't think she would come back to stay, but they would be forgiven, and she would visit, and protect them against armies, no matter Quil's fuming and Phi's gentle concern. Haoti hopes, for her sake, that they never try. “It doesn't speak well of them that they won't try,” he says instead of explaining of that, a different kind of truth.

“I know. And we'll have to talk about it. And tomorrow there will have to be a meeting with the rest of the cousins, and Trilli's due to try me again and I have to have an answer for her. But for tonight, there's more pressing business.” She looks at Valira, and whatever Haoti thinks of the Linnaeus family, they raise smart children who see no use in talking around the obvious. “Come meet your namesake, Lira.”

She moves so quickly that Haoti almost can't track it, one moment stepping forward as a wolf, and the next kneeling at Finch's feet as a woman, hands out just as Finch's are, making a cradle for the baby between them as she startles awake with a cry at the sudden movement and magic in the room. They're both dry-eyed in a way that makes him wish they would cry, and there don't seem to be any words for what happens then.

“Come on,” says Ker a second or ten minutes later, hand on Haoti's shoulder. “We'll give them a minute.”

*

Going back to the central fire would mean an explanation, and Haoti refuses to start that tonight. Valira can begin with Finch, and see anyone else she likes in the morning, and he'll stand between her and anyone she doesn't want to see.

Ker seems to agree without having to be told, and he leads Haoti out into the forest instead, past the edge of the settlement. He doesn't have Haoti's half-elf ease with seeing in the dark, but even if he's new, he knows the forest well, and he doesn't stumble. He just leads them away to the stream they must be using as their water supply and shucks off his boots without ceremony to stand in it. Haoti, after a second, follows suit, and hisses with the cold, which makes Ker chuckle. “Always helps me think, and I suspect you need some of that. I sure do. Didn't expect my mysterious and powerful cousin-in-law to show up as a wolf at the dinner fire. Though I think Finch did, ever since Val was born she's been saying that if any strangers come, we need to host them.”

“Not much gets past her,” Haoti says.

“She was next oldest after Valira—too young to actually take care of them, but the oldest of the ones who were there when Valira killed him. Rowan tries to balance both sides, even if he's with us, so Finch became the ringleader by default.” He kicks a splash at the far bank of the stream. “Trilli was the impetuous one, and I don't blame her for not being able to stand sticking around long enough to make sure Ash and Valerian and the whole next generation don't grow up in fear like this one, but Finch is the one in charge.”

“When did you meet?”

“Market fair on the south side of the forest.” His mouth tilts up. “I was a soldier, and I deserted, after a bit of courtship. The soldiering didn't suit me like this does. I like the peaceful life. Though that doesn't mean I won't defend the family if I need to.”

“They must not like that.”

“They don't know. They've lost their children's trust, and it's a damn sad thing. It hurts all of them. You know what I think?”

Haoti thinks that no matter Valira's friends' opinions on her family, they would like this man, frank and cheerful and honest. That's a thread of hope in all of this, at least. “What do you think?”

“I think Valira's the first person anyone ever cast out. Not that she's the first who killed someone, but the first to be sent away for it. It's the end of the longest peace this forest has ever seen, and maybe, sometime along the line, someone forgot to tell their children or their grandchildren that death should be a last resort, but that people who would retaliate tenfold are people who would do it anyway, without the excuse of retaliation.” Ker shrugs. “Most armies would. Find unarmed, peaceful people with a concentration of supplies?”

“I was a soldier. I know that too.” Seath's armies were brutal, especially under his father's command. “You think it's the end of peacetime too, then?”

Ker sits on the bank, rolling up his trouser legs. “I probably wouldn't have been at that market fair so close to the border if our queen weren't ready to test the border. It was, judging from what you said, a little before Seath died, but his grip was already slipping.”

“And what will happen here?”

“We'll fight if we need to, and run when we can.” Haoti sits down across the stream from him and rolls his own soaked cuffs. “Some things might have gone wrong in the passing down, but I believe this community has been in the forest through worse wars than this one could be. It will be hard, but we can do what's necessary. If I had an army, I'd just take the forest. Push both countries ten miles back from it on a side, and carve ourselves out some land. But that would be more blood than I'm willing to spill. It's just a dream.”

Valira alone could probably make it a reality. If Phi and Quil and Kithri joined her, nobody would gainsay them, and there would be a little forest kingdom, a buffer, in constant danger but free of the worries for at least a while. A generation or three. “There are forests in the north too,” he says, because Valira deserves that. “Her life is there, at least for now, but you and Finch, any of her cousins … you'd be welcome.”

Ker is shaking his head before Haoti finishes. “This is home. I don't think Finch would say different. Robin might get restless someday, or one of the others, and it's good to know they have somewhere to go, but I can't imagine leaving the Greenwoods.” They sit in silence for a while. Haoti can't decide if he's getting used to the temperature of the water or if his feet are just going numb. “I can't puzzle your place in this,” Ker finally says. “I don't think you told us half your story, when asked.”

“No. It's not a pretty one.”

“And I've got no right to it. But at least—are you her lover? A friend? I'm guessing not a husband.”

“Not a husband,” Haoti agrees, but the other labels are more difficult. He doesn't know how to explain his feelings towards Valira to himself, let alone anyone else. He loves her, but love has always been complicated for him, and so different in all instances. It's easier to break it down into small pieces, about devotion and kindness and debt and wishing fiercely that he could deserve her, but none of them are easy answers. “A friend, I suppose,” he says at last.

“I've been that kind of friend before,” says Ker, a little rueful. “Is it a not now, or a not ever?”

Haoti shrugs. “That's up to her.”

“Well, I like you, so I'll hope it's a not now.” Ker stands again. “There are some nice little fish that come down this stream at night sometimes. By the time we've valiantly tried and failed to catch any, it might be safe to go home again.”

They stay out there late, until Haoti's feet are numb and his lips must be nearly blue with cold, but Ker swears he's good luck, because when they return to the hut to find the three of them asleep, the two women curled around the baby, they've got a meal's worth of fish to cook in the morning.

*

Haoti went to sleep with Ker on the bedroll next to him, neither of them having the heart to wake “our ladies,” as he phrased it, but he wakes up with Valira. He's vaguely aware of having been awake in the night to the sound of crying several times, and the movement of people soothing a baby, but when he wakes in the morning, she's there, awake and staring at the ceiling, and their hosts seem to be missing.

“Ker and Finch?”

“Out doing morning chores and spreading the word to the rest of my cousins,” she says, and reaches out for him as if automatically, wrapping her hand around his wrist and squeezing tight. “Finch says they'll try to be discreet. It's odd thinking of them as old enough to be.”

“And you're … well?”

Valira is quiet and solemn for a few minutes. “Not yet, but eventually,” she decides at last.

Haoti doesn't have any talent for comfort. His efforts always seem clumsy at best, and he lives at Fairpoint Hold, where they all know best how to comfort each other, Terry's easy sympathy and Ronan's unfailing sweetness and even Kithri's gruff insistence on making pie. But here they are, and he's all Valira has right now, and she's blank-faced with shock and grief and loss—not the loss of people anymore, but the loss of more than a decade of time, all catching up with her.

Sometimes the simplest things are best. Haoti thinks of his mother, and what Aredhel would do for hurts large and small when he was a child, and simply opens his arms and lets Valira decide what to do.

To his surprise, she takes the offer, rolling to hide her face in his shoulder, and he lets his arms close around her, dredges up another memory and strokes her back and makes hushing noises as she weeps. “I'm sorry,” she says after a while, when he's blessing her cousins for taking some time to deal with their own shock, as they must be.

“You needed someone. I wouldn't be anywhere else.”

She lifts her face, tear-stained and blotchy but somehow with a smile breaking through. “Good,” she says. “Stay, today. I can't do this alone.”

“I won't go anywhere,” he promises, and holds on.

*

By the time the first cousins arrive, they're both cleaned up, with some food in them, and Valira has managed to communicate that Finch and Ker have gone to deal with the night's haul of fish, and that he's welcome to go out if he wants, though he declines the offer.

The cousins arrive chattering away, falsely bright against the forest sounds, making too-obvious excuses about needing to go in to fetch Finch's laundry to take it down to the stream to wash, and go silent as soon as they open the door. They're a pair of the young women from the fire the night before, both of them about eighteen, one of them no doubt Trilli's sister and the other, he thinks, Finch's, and as soon as they're through, they're struck silent at the sight of Valira.

Valira stands, her hand braced on his shoulder so he's left awkwardly sitting while everyone else stands. “Andula. Wren.”

“I can't believe it's you,” one of them gasps—Andula, he suspects, Trilli's sister—and then they're both rushing forward, nearly knocking Valira over with the force of their embrace and making her clutch his shoulder even tighter.

All three women are talking at once, questions that don't get answered until three exchanges later, tearful and scolding and everything in between. Haoti stays where he is and listens. It's a skill he's learned in his new life, and maybe eavesdropping isn't something he should be proud of, but it's taught him more about people than anything in his first life did.

“Finch says you're here because you were worried she was in danger,” Wren says into a lull. “Thank you. I know it can't be easy for you to be here, but that you'd come for her—it means a lot.”

“I'd come for any of you,” Valira promises, and finally lets go of his shoulder so she can hug both of her cousins at once.

Haoti moves back to lean against a wall and keeps watching. Valira doesn't seem to need him right now, but he promised to stay, and he won't go back on his word.

*

The older generation must know what's happening in Finch's hut, the way the morning unfolds. Valira's cousins come one at a time, but they don't switch off, or pretend they're all just checking in on the visitor as he cloisters himself away for no reason. They just come and stay.

Wren and Andula have most of a half hour alone with Valira and Haoti, barely long enough for him to get a sense of them, how Andula talks more but defers to Wren when she has something to say, that Andula is clearly fondly exasperated with Trilli's adventures and Wren has more of an ear for the political consequences of Valira's. Finch comes back after that, with Valerian strapped to her chest, and the circle of cousins expands, a mess of memories where they were together and where they were apart. Like Ker said, she's the leader of them, and if Ker did get his dream of a Greenwoods with its own borders, she would be an efficient queen.

Robin follows her, and he's the youngest of this group of cousins at fourteen and must dearly miss Trilli to bridge the gap between him and Wren and Andula. It doesn't take long to realize that it's split this way because he's the youngest who remembers Valira, and he may have more in common with the twelve-year-old twins who were too young to be with them that day but won't ever be classed with them. Valira is the one who killed the soldier, but everyone who was with her that day is different, set apart within their community.

Robin is also the first to cry, dashing at his eyes with his sleeves and trying to pretend he's not until Valira gathers him into her arms and holds on tight, murmuring something Haoti can't hear.

Haoti stays back, and watches the patterns they fall into, the subjects they choose and avoid. None of them ask how long she's staying, and none of them ask about that day. She doesn't ask them about their parents or hers. They talk about fond memories, new and old, and Haoti gets the sense that the small community means they may be cousins, but they're really more like siblings, every one of them. He met his cousins on his father's side only a few times, and his mother's not at all, but he's beginning to understand that this is a very different situation, that they haven't been small pieces missing from Valira's life in the past ten years, but painful gaps.

Rowan is the last to arrive, with a communal bowl of flame-charred fish on skewers as a peace offering—and it is one, Haoti can tell that instantly, because he wasn't there that day, and as the oldest of them, his presence could have changed it the most, if he'd taken on the burden instead of Valira or held her back. He's part of this group of cousins, but not as deeply.

He still looks at Valira just as hungrily as the others, though, finding the changes in her face, the scars on her arms and the one that claws up her collarbone, courtesy of a chimera. “Lira. If I'd known last night—I'm sorry.”

She nods up at him. “I didn't mean you to know. And I'm sorry too. Deceiving you wasn't—well, I wanted to know what kind of welcome I would receive.”

“And you,” says Rowan, the first of the cousins to do more than nod at Haoti. “Thank you for traveling with her. We owe you a debt.”

“I owe her one,” Haoti corrects. “I would never have done anything else.”

Rowan nods and gestures him over. “Come on, then. If I know them they've been exhausting themselves for hours now. Come eat some of last night's catch, and then maybe you can join Sella and Ker, who are avoiding everyone else.”

Haoti has just enough time to realize how uncomfortable it must be for Ker and Sella to be married to members of the community who set themselves so staunchly apart, especially when there's a secret afoot, before Valira gestures him over, moving until there's a space in the circle next to her, displacing Andula, who makes a displeased noise, but keeping Robin close to her side.

For a moment, he thinks of taking one of the skewers and excusing himself, but Valira wants him to stay, so he goes to sit next to her, and helps Rowan as best as he can to talk about easy things, at least long enough for all of them to eat and breathe.

*

“You can't stay here all day,” Valira whispers when they've eaten and fallen apart into smaller conversations, Rowan frowning at Robin's tunic and claiming he's growing an inch a day and will need to move up into Rowan's castoffs soon enough, Wren and Andula and Finch arguing over whose turn it is to do duty in the smokehouse.

“I told you I'd stay.”

“The worst is over and I'm releasing you.” Haoti opens his mouth to object and she takes his hand. “I'll be fine. If you're that worried, stay within forty yards of here and I'll be able to send a Message if I want you back.”

There's really no arguing with that, and in case he tries, Valira is already turning away to tease Rowan that Robin is going to outstrip him in height soon, so Haoti sighs and stands. He draws some interested glances, but Andula gives him a nod and Finch waves him out, so he goes.

He's tempted to go off into the woods, or back down to the stream, but he wants to stay close, and Rowan told him to go find Sella and Ker, so he walks to the center of camp instead.

There's a group of children running around with wild abandon, with Ash the youngest and the twelve-year-olds the oldest, but even their wild abandon is quiet. No one here ever shouts or screams. Valerian is probably the loudest member of the community, and even she has clearly learned, in her few days of life, that even a muted cry will get a response. They don't sing as they work, or call out—any call that needs to cross a distance comes in a whistle.

The adults, watching the children about their play, are also watching Haoti. They're mostly clustered around the central fire, working on some kind of preserve, from the smell of it. There's a man sitting on a box midway through the slow process of making a new bow, and a few women in various stages of working with textiles in front of their huts, one stitching a garment together, another with a drop spindle, and a third at a proper spinning wheel, and it's only when she gives him a smile and tilts her head to invite him over that he realizes it's Sella, and that Ker isn't far away carding wool for her.

Haoti would rather not have whatever conversations necessary in front of people he has no reason to trust, but for the time being, he doesn't seem to have any other options, so he sits down and takes out his whetstone and his eating knife and waits for one of them to speak.

“Wayfinder, is it?” Sella asks eventually.

“It's her name,” says Haoti, and hardly cares who might be hurt by it. “She didn't have another and she chose it.”

“Didn't she?” asks Ker.

“None she felt she had the right to claim.”

Both wince, and neither argue. Haoti doesn't look at anyone else, and doesn't say anything more, to soften it or to make it worse. After a moment, Sella speaks again. “And you're her protector?”

“She doesn't need one of those. If anything, she's mine.” Sella hums out a dissatisfied noise, but he doesn't know what she wants, besides admissions he can't and won't give right now, with Valira's parents no doubt listening. “Tell me how you met Rowan instead.”

After a moment, Sella tells the story, nothing exciting, just her family, charcoal burners on the edge of the woods and frequent traders with the Linnaeus community, and Rowan making his first trade alone and being terribly smitten, and tempting her away with stories of his beautiful home. By the time it's over, the community elders have decided to ignore them, and Haoti can relax and take out his whittling knife, picking up a nearby chunk of wood to see what comes out.

Rowan is the first of the cousins to show up, and there's a moment's awkward silence before he gives a general frown around, scoops Ash out of the mass of children, and bears him away on some errand. Wren and Andula come after, and Haoti stands up with only the rough shape of a cooking spoon begun. “If you'll excuse me,” he says to Sella and Ker, interrupting one of Ker's stories about the market fair where he met Finch and an old woman who tried to take every copper he had for a ribbon he was trying to buy.

Ker nods right away. “I'll be back home in just a bit, or sooner if Finch gives me a whistle, I've left her alone with Val too long.”

“I'll let her know,” Haoti promises, and gives Andula and Wren a nod as he passes them. Wren looks like she's been crying, but Andula is close by and ready to offer comfort, and he hardly knows either of them, so it's not his place to get involved.

He can't say he's surprised when there's a cleared throat behind him when he's barely out of the center of the settlement. He's more surprised when he finds Valira's father instead of her mother. He's a tall, stout man with hair streaked by the sun and by gray, and his beard doesn't cover wrinkles carved out more by unhappiness than laughter. He certainly isn't smiling now. “How is she?”

There are a hundred cruel answers Haoti could give that this man would more than deserve. He can feel the instinct rise up, the haughty unkindness he wishes he were worse at. It would be so easy to curl his lip and say _You've lost the right to ask that question_ or _So you're fine with her killing now that she can protect you_ or even just _I don't know why you'd care about a stranger's wolf_. He still has the instincts to know just where to put the knife in. And if there was ever a time for it, it's this. Even Quil might approve of him, if he told her he'd ripped Valira's father to shreds. But he thinks about Valira, in Finch's hut, and how he doesn't know if she'll ever be ready to admit that throwing her out was a cruelty beyond forgiveness, and how hurt she would be if she knew he'd done it. “I can ask her if she'd like to answer that herself,” he says instead.

He flinches. That's enough of an answer. He won't do it, is some kind of too cowardly to go see his daughter. The question is if he's too cowardly to go against his family's strictures, or too cowardly to ask for forgiveness. Haoti can understand the latter a little more than the former, but either way, it ends in Valira hurt. He already knows she can't hear about this conversation. “I just want to know she's well.”

“Please,” says Valira's mother, and it seems that she was just a little late to slip away, not more strict with the community's morals than her husband. She looks very much like Valira, in this light, just with less of the height, and with hair graying quickly. “If she came ...”

“You're talking to me and not to her, so you're doing the wrong thing,” says Haoti, and shakes his head before either of them can speak. “No. Not this time. I don't have any absolution for you, and she has the right to have a happy reunion without reckoning with either of you, and I won't say anything she hasn't told me I can share. Just … do you know what you did was wrong? Unnecessary?”

Both of them take the question with their chins still held high, and he hates how easy it is to see Valira in them, how much they still influence her after all these years. She never turns away from things like this either. “Yes,” says her mother, and takes her husband's hand. “As soon as we were through the shock.”

“After a year, when we weren't attacked, we applied to the community to find her, and we searched for weeks without letting the children know, but we never could find her,” he says. “We wanted to before that.”

All Haoti hears is that they left their daughter, all of fifteen, to fend for herself for a year, to starve or freeze or be attacked on her own, that their morals mattered more than her life. “If you ever feel any debt to me at all, don't tell her that. I don't know what it will do to her. But either way, I can't pass messages. Ask your nieces and nephews what they'll tell you, and ask your sisters and brothers to talk about it, and then when she comes again—because she will, now, she's more loyal than any of you but her cousins deserve—maybe you can go to her, and apologize, and ask her to tell you what she's been going through these past ten years.”

“I understand,” says her mother.

Her father, though, tries again. “I want to give her my apologies, when she's ready, but please—I just want to hear if she's happy, now that she's somehow saved the world.”

_If she is, it's not because of you, and it may never be,_ Haoti's talent for cruelty says. “Ask your nieces and nephews,” he says instead. “This community needs a reckoning of honesty, from all the things you haven't been telling each other and trusting each other with. That's a good start to try.”

When her father opens his mouth, her mother shakes her head sharply, pulling at his hand. “Thank you, Haoti. I'm glad she has you to defend her. Whatever you are to her, it's clear you care.”

“I do.” He starts turning away before he sighs and stops and tries to think of how to leave a door open for Valira, when she someday wants one. “I can tell you from experience—it feels horrible to be forgiven when you've done nothing yet to earn it. I'm still trying to work through that, and pay my debt to her. Think about that, before you try this again.”

Her father's head dips in a quick nod, and that's as good as Haoti expects, so he walks away, in the direction of Finch's hut, head and heart aching.

When he gets there, Robin is holding little Valerian with a look of panic while she fusses, and Valira and Finch are, from the look of it, braiding cord out of old twine for some purpose or another, and Haoti sits down against the wall and tries not to interrupt their conversation and isn't surprised when Ker shows up only a minute or so later, with a sober look for Haoti that says he overheard at least part of that and stayed tactfully out of the way.

*

“We should talk about how long we're going to stay,” Valira murmurs that night, sitting with him down at the stream. He'd expected her to want to be with her cousins, whoever could get away from the night fire, but as soon as they'd eaten the stew Ker and Wren brought back for them, since Finch and Valerian were trying their first fire together, Valira had suggested the two of them go for a walk.

“That's up to you completely. If you want to go tonight, we'll go tonight. If you want to stay a week, we can.”

Valira sighs. “That's the trouble. I want both. I hoped maybe you would have clarity.”

“You brought me because I would let you make your own decisions,” he points out. “I'd like to live up to that.”

“That's not why I brought you.”

“Then why did you?”

There's a silence after that, but it's a silence he expects. Valira answers questions quickly until she needs to think about them, and then no amount of impatience can make her think faster. “A lot of reasons,” she finally says. “Quil or Phi would have murdered my parents, for instance. Ker says you talked to them.”

Haoti's heart sinks. “I should have told you.”

“Maybe. He wouldn't share much of what you said, but I know you well enough to know that you thought about whatever you said, and that you wouldn't do anything that would hurt me. Ker also said ...” She stops, and Haoti doesn't know what he could possibly say to any of it, so he waits to see what Ker might have mentioned specifically. “I didn't bring you because I think you owe me anything. I don't want you owing me.”

Valira doesn't give fast answers to hard questions, and she doesn't like to receive them, either, so Haoti stops, and thinks over his instinctive response. Mostly, he thinks over the difference between what she wants to be true and what he knows is true in his bones, and how to explain it to her, that it's a debt he welcomes and he knows she'd never abuse the power. “You didn't just save my life,” he finally says. “You brought me back from death. And—I know you'll say that's nothing, like it isn't the most incredible magic in the world. But before I died, Valira, you believed I could be good, even when I wasn't. A goddess told you I was a noble soul, and you believed her. You tried to reach out when I wanted to be miserable and alone.”

Another silence. “After a while traveling with Phi and Quil and Kithri, it stopped … it stopped being useful, trying to count up those debts. I saved them, they saved me. What mattered was that there was always someone there you could trust to save you. That's what I want with you.”

“I trust you. And I know you didn't do any of it to put me in your debt. But I haven't saved your life.”

“But I know that you would. And I hope you wouldn't be doing it because you owe me.”

“Why does the thought bother you so much?”

Valira reaches out for his hand and takes it. “Because I don't want to think that you'll do something that would hurt you, or that you'd feel like you had to pretend to enjoy, because you think you owe me.”

Haoti finds himself, stupidly, stunned silent for a minute at the feel of her hand in his, but when she tries to withdraw, he clutches on tight. “I'll tell you what I do feel I owe you, so it's clear between us. If your life is in danger and there's something I can do to save you, no matter the danger to me, I'll do that. I would do it even if I didn't owe you, but it's duty and desire together. If you're hurt and I can heal you or help you, I'll do that. If you ask something of me, I'll consider it, and if I feel like I can and I should, I'll do it. And I owe you my honesty. If you asked for something I can't or won't give, I'll always tell you.”

“I'll try to accept that.” She yawns and leans against his shoulder. “Maybe another day and night. I can't just stay in Finch's hut forever, and I can't bring myself to walk out of it when I might see someone else yet.”

“You won't be talking to your parents on this visit, then?”

“No. I need to think about that. My cousins are a good beginning. They're what I've missed most.”

“I'm glad. It would be horrible missing the people who'd disowned you most.”

Valira is silent for a few long seconds. “They didn't need to. Did I ever tell you that? I'd been told my whole life that there was only one thing I could do that would get me exiled, so as soon as they all knew I'd done it, I just started packing. They never said anything. They just didn't stop me from going, either.”

Haoti wishes, abruptly, that he'd been crueler, even if it's a horrible thing to wish. “How can you forgive them?” he asks, heartsore for her, angry that they'd even think to ask it of her.

“I'm not sure yet,” she admits. “I always dreamed—not that they would have me back, but that it had never happened, but now I've gained too much to want that. And I find that I'm not sure I can ever trust them again, even if I forgive them. It will be a while before I figure it out.”

“So one more day and one more night,” he says. “And then we'll go home? Or do you have somewhere else you want to stop?”

“We'll go home,” says Valira, and they sit there in silence until Haoti is pretty sure Finch and Ker will be asleep.

*

Haoti's day begins with a Sending from Allan. _Kithri and Trilli say Valira's answers aren't satisfactory, though Finch told Trilli some news. All well?_

Haoti pries his eyes open. It's not long past dawn, and Valira is curled away from him, but seemingly still asleep. Allan must have done a lot of magic yesterday and been harried into casting Sending as soon as he's up, or had to study it again, if he's asking this early. _As well as could be expected. Leaving in a day or so. She'll say as much as she wants to say._

After a minute, Allan Sends again. _Good answer. I'll hold everyone off as long as I can. Quil can Teleport you both back if you want._

_Valira will probably need the journey,_ Haoti Sends back, and shakes her awake, second-guessing the answer. She wakes quickly and rolls over, eyes already open. “Do you want Quil to Teleport us back from the edge of the forest?”

“Is she asking you? No, I'll fly. Need the time to think.”

“Allan was asking me, possibly with her hanging over his shoulder. Kithri and Trilli haven't been Sending to me, but apparently they have to you.”

“Every day. Sometimes both of them. I don't mind it, there's just too much to say in so few words. But they know we're coming back soon.”

“Talking about leaving already?” Finch asks, and Haoti curses his own lack of thought as he sits up and looks over at her. She's feeding Valerian, and Ker is already gone, which isn't a shock, since Valira mentioned that hunters leave before dawn, when they're on duty. “Calm, Haoti. She said it wouldn't be long.”

Behind him, Valira sits up too. “Probably we'll be off with dawn tomorrow. I know it's fast, but everyone here needs to talk. And I ...”

“You need to think,” Finch says, and Haoti is so relieved that even after ten years and untold changes, she at least knows Valira well enough not to force her to finish that sentence. “Haoti, if you get us all breakfast and pass word to at least one of the cousins, they'll figure it out from there. And then … I don't know, from there. Lira?”

“Whatever you want, Haoti.”

He shifts until he can see them both at once. “Do you want me to stay?”

Valira looks between them, all of them waiting for one of the others to make a decision, but in the end, she sighs and speaks. “I'll be fine here. You should do whatever you like. But maybe stay close?”

“I can do that,” he says, and levers himself to his feet, already searching for his boots to go look for breakfast. Hopefully Valira's parents have said their piece and won't search him out again, and the worst he'll have to deal with is hours of awkwardness, not wanting to go out of Valira's Message range but not really having anyone to talk to either. “I'll be back with breakfast.”

Breakfast is a grain he doesn't recognize sweetened with berries and honey, and Haoti fills three bowls and looks around until he catches sight of Wren about some business and waves her over. “Word from Finch's?” she asks as soon as she's close enough, lowering her voice. It's not busy in the community's center today, but he appreciates the discretion.

“We're leaving tomorrow morning. Finch said to pass that around to everyone.”

Her face crumples for just a moment before she straightens. “Good to know. I'll tell them. Rowan's off on today's hunt, but the rest of them will be free, and he'll be back early afternoon, most likely.”

“Is there anything that needs doing today? I want to give you all time, but I don't like to sit around being useless.”

Wren shrugs. “Go fishing, perhaps. You had better luck with that than Ker ever does the other night.”

It's not the most interesting option, but he can take his whittling, and maybe leave Finch with a spoon when he goes, so he gives Wren a nod and watches her reverse directions, probably going in search of Andula, before he goes back to deliver breakfast and the news that Rowan can't come. “I'm going fishing,” he says once he's had his own bowl, letting their talk wash over him. “I'll just be at the stream if you need me, Valira.”

“Come back if you want to,” she says, holding out her hands for his bowl. “We won't kick you out.”

“You deserve time,” he says, gives her his bowl, and ducks out into the morning sun to go down to the stream.

*

Haoti isn't the only one at the stream, though he's there longest. He sets a net and improvises a pole, baiting it with a worm he digs up, and his rate of catch isn't high, but it's a decent amount nonetheless. Nobody else who comes to the stream talks to him—one of Valira's uncles and a girl of about eight who regards him with awe while they work their laundry against a washboard, a few people hauling water—but Haoti doesn't mind. He sits and whittles while he waits for fish, and every once in a while, Valira will send a Message.

 _Robin threatening to stow away,_ she says first, and he makes an awkward answer trying to keep to her light tone, and then an hour later it's _Never tell Kithri how much I miss her pies, not enough butter or sugar in the woods for them_.

_Kithri would be offended if you even tried,_ he replies, and gets only the sensation of laughter back.

Valira sends another Message every hour or so from there, commenting on her cousins or the food or on how sick she is of staying in Finch's hut, since it's clear she's not a wolf, to which he replies that nobody will pay any mind to a sparrow.

He can't say he's surprised when, sometime late in the afternoon, a sparrow perches fearlessly on his shoulder. Animals tend to like him, these days, since he knows how to sit quiet and still, but they don't land on him unasked the way they do Valira, so this must be her. Sure enough, it's hardly a second before she sends a Message. _Good idea. Everyone's dispersed to do the work they've been neglecting. Come back for dinner with all of us._

“Are the hunters back?”

_Rowan showed up an hour back. Spotted boar sign to the north, we should be careful tomorrow. Caught some rabbits._

“Must be a common meat source here.” He puts his knife down. He's just smoothing the spoon out, now, and that's a job for sanding. “Want to do anything before then? Safe distance, so you can be yourself?”

_Right now a sparrow is myself. Tomorrow's soon enough. Dawn?_

“I assumed. Later on, chances are you might run into someone. Are we going to find a clear space where you can take off, or are we hiking a while?”

_If you don't mind, I want to spend one more night in the den._

“That's fine by me.” He leans back, slow enough that she has an easy time hopping for balance on his shoulder, and rests his head against a tree. “Sella and Ker coming to dinner? I don't want to be the only non-cousin there.”

_They are, Ash too, and Ker specifically said you should come._ She hesitates, but he can feel the thread of the magic remaining, the words unused. _He said the families of the cousins should stick together._

Ker meddles, it seems. Haoti thinks about his answer, and what questions are worth asking and what denials she might possibly believe. “You of all people,” he finally says, “have the right to say who your family is and isn't. And what kind of family you want people to be.”

It's as good a time as any to say it. If Valira doesn't want to answer, she can fly away. She doesn't. She waits a while, keeping her thoughts private, before she sends another message. _You are my family. You've earned that. But some kinds of family can't be just one person's choice._

“I thought it was obvious how I feel,” Haoti admits. “But maybe we should wait until we're not here before we talk about what we want. I'm here for you either way, but you already have plenty on your mind. This can wait. Whatever the outcome is.”

_You're a better man than you think you are. And you're assuming this has only occurred to me recently._

“It can still wait. You are aware that Quil will kill me if there's even the slightest hint that I took advantage of your vulnerability to fool you into caring for me—and that's not to mention Kithri or Trilli.”

Valira gently pecks his shoulder. _You think Quil doesn't know, and Kithri and Trilli haven't guessed? But I see your point. But we'll talk tomorrow._

“If you insist, but there's still no hurry.” He sighs. “How long till dinner? Or until they expect you back?”

_A while still. Let's just stay here for a while._

Haoti takes her at her word, lingering in silence, without much more to do, until she finally admits that they should go back to Finch's, especially since they'll want to sleep early, if they're leaving at dawn and expecting Valerian to wake them in the night.

Valira's cousins, already collecting with their own communal dinner of the rabbits Rowan snared and some mushrooms and plants they've foraged, are all startled when Haoti arrives to offer his fish and suddenly the sparrow flitting around his head is Valira. There's a lot of exclaiming over her skill with magic, and then teasing from Rowan, unsure at first but then braver, about how she must have learned that talent early, for her habit of disappearing whenever there was work she didn't want to do as a child.

Then it's reminiscing from all of them. Robin is quietest of the cousins, fidgeting and listening, sometimes piping up with an unsure “I think I remember that” from the later memories. Wren remembers a boy in a forest-edge town who flirted with Valira a few months before she left, and Andula tells a whole series of stories about things that haven't changed, in the years between them, making merciless but fond fun of Trilli for her lack of skill with making preserves as she goes. Rowan and Finch have the most memories, and Valira shares memories of them all right back, ones she must have treasured over the years. She talks about Andula falling in a mud puddle and Rowan's early adventures in learning archery, about Finch almost dropping Robin the first time she held him and Wren's favorite stories. All the while, she sits with Ash held in her lap as he gazes at her, fascinated. He's too young still to remember this visit his whole life, as far as Haoti can tell, but maybe they'll tell him about it, and maybe he'll remember the next one.

Haoti sits with Sella and Ker, and listens to the cousins with one ear and to their conversation with the other, not sure about joining either one. The other two have clearly heard many of these stories before, and don't want to join in themselves, when they don't have their own memories of Valira, so they whisper about community business and the season to come. Sometimes one of them will ask him a question about Tyne or Fairpoint Hold, but mostly they seem to understand that he's eavesdropping, and they leave him be.

As it gets darker, the silences grow longer, and their voices grow a little less steady. Robin and Finch, on Valira's left and right, lean into her shoulders, and Ash toddles away to his mother, fussing a little with the long day. Valerian, at least, is fast asleep, strapped to her mother's chest.

“Come on,” Haoti says at last, when the silence seems to have choked everything off, looking to Ker and Sella. “Ker, we can head inside, maybe take Valerian, and Sella, I won't say what you and Ash should do, but—”

“No, I agree,” she says, already moving to stand. “And this one will be a terror in the morning if I don't get him to sleep anyway. Come visit us again sometime, won't you, Haoti? You've been a pleasant and helpful guest and you're a better fisherman than many around here.”

Haoti stands too, and Ker joins them, going over to Finch and dislodging Valerian so gently she hardly seems to know she's being moved. “Glad to know I'm welcome,” he says, instead of making any promises, and since it's obvious Valira and her cousins are all watching, he turns to them as well. “And thank you all.”

He's not thanking them for their hospitality, but mostly for still wanting Valira to be part of their family, for not letting their parents convince them she deserved to be shunned because it would be easier and leave harmony in the community. Judging from their solemn expressions, it's likely they understand all of that and more. “Come back soon,” says Wren, and it's probably aimed at Valira, but he appreciates it anyway.

Everyone else chimes in with similar sentiments, and thanks he doesn't really deserve, and Haoti gives them an awkward nod before he follows Ker away from the circle of warmth and through the few steps to his and Finch's hut.

When they're inside, with a fire lit, Ker unceremoniously hands Valerian to Haoti. Babies here, Haoti is discovering, are rarely put down, except to sleep at night. During the day, she's always in someone's arms or strapped to their chest or back. He hasn't had a turn yet, and isn't sure of the last time he held a baby. Maybe a soldier's child, back at Fort Belvale, and even then it wasn't for long, or often, so he's hesitant, and so stiff that Valerian wakes a little, unhappy.

Ker just laughs at his discomfort. “You're not going to drop her. And I need to get a few things done, I imagine the ladies will want to sleep when they get back.”

“Think it will be late?”

“Probably. Rowan will head off soon, I expect, and Robin will fall asleep if he doesn't, but the women will stay up half the night if Wren doesn't remember that Finch just had a difficult birth two weeks ago and still needs plenty of rest and healing. And if Finch doesn't remember you two are planning to leave early, though then again she may be making excuses to keep you longer.”

“It's going to be hard for all of them, with Valira's home base so far north,” Haoti observes. “She can visit more easily than many people can, especially if she eventually trusts Quil to Teleport her down without wanting to have a word with her parents, but it will still be hard.”

Ker shrugs. “Isn't family always? They miss Trilli, but they do well enough with Sendings, and I know Valira doesn't know it, but they'll find ways.”

With that, Ker changes the subject, rattling on about an upcoming market to the south that he'll probably be attending even if it will mean leaving Finch and Valerian for three days because he tends to get the best prices on goods and because he'll know the signs of gathering military presence better than anyone else. Haoti is grateful to listen as he slowly rocks Valerian, getting used to the movements, looking at her face and musing over who she might be when she gets older, if she'll be like her mother or her father or her namesake or none of them.

All three of them are nodding off by the time Valira and Finch come back, Finch immediately taking Valerian for a nighttime feed and Valira automatically going to check on the packing of her bag so it will be faster to leave in the morning, a routine he's seen many times, but only rarely in his second life. “All well?” he asks, noting the tear-tracks on her face and, when he looks closer, on Finch's.

“Well enough.” She clasps his shoulder gently when he goes over next to her, already climbing into his bedroll. “Get some rest. You don't need to worry about me tonight.”

“Someone should be.”

Ker and Finch are talking quietly as they get into bed, and Valira frowns thoughtfully while she follows suit, putting aside her bag and then settling in her bedroll facing him. The fire is banked, but there's still enough light for him to see that she's watching him. “You always do, don't you?”

“I try,” he says, and neither of them speaks again, but Valira rolls close enough to press her face into his shoulder, and after a while, her breathing evens into the rhythms of sleep, and Haoti isn't far behind her.

*

Haoti wakes in the gray before dawn disoriented and alone, but it doesn't take much effort to find Valira. She's sitting next to Valerian's cradle, rocking her gently and making soothing noises as Valerian fusses a little. Her bedroll is already packed and stowed, and she's dressed for their journey again.

He sits up and starts dressing and packing as well, staying as quiet as he can. Their hosts are new parents, after all, and deserve all the sleep they can get. Still, by the time he finishes, Valerian is fast asleep, and there's light seeping in through the chimney hole, true dawn.

“Up to you,” he whispers, because as far as he's concerned, it always is.

Valira sighs and gives three sharp raps against the frame of Finch and Ker's cot, startling them both awake, Ker with a groan and Finch with the alert silence that any child raised in the forest in constant fear of violence would learn. “We should be off. The later we leave it, the more likely we are to run into an aunt or uncle. How many of them do you think are waiting to escort us partway?”

“My guess is the girls and Rowan.” Finch sits up and swings her legs off the bed, wincing as she goes, and takes Valira's hands. “Come back. At least to the forest's edge, and we'll meet you there. Before my daughter walks. And then before she runs.”

“And then before she sets her first snare,” Valira promises. “I don't know how often it will be, and how long it will be for, and I don't know how close I can come, but now that I know I'm wanted, you'll see me.”

Finch gives a shaky inhale. “You always have been. And anyone who questions your right to be here will have a hard time of it. We'll defend you.”

Valira puts her arms around Finch and holds on, and they're both whispering, but Haoti ignores whatever they're saying, getting up and shouldering his pack, nodding at Ker as he gets up and hands Haoti a wrapped bundle of fresh rations. “Travel safe,” says Ker. “And you're as welcome as she is, as far as I'm concerned. Sella agrees. You're one of us now.”

Haoti looks at Valira. “Maybe. I hope so. But we'll see.”

Valira and Finch don't take too much longer at their goodbyes, and then Valira is putting on her pack, nodding at Ker, and almost as part of the same movement, she's a wolf again. Finch makes a soft, surprised sound, and Valerian starts crying again in her crib, and Haoti puts a hand on her ruff when she goes over to him. _Tell them goodbye,_ she sends in a Message. _I can't anymore._

Since she could just as easily send a Message to Finch as to Haoti, he suspects the “can't” has more to do with how close she is to breaking. “She says goodbye.” He turns to Finch. “Thank you.”

She doesn't ask for what. She moves to the crib and picks up Valerian, and then she and Ker and the baby are all next to each other, Ker reaching out to comfort her, an unconscious mirror of Haoti's attempts to comfort Valira. “Thank you,” she says. “And goodbye, Lira. I love you.”

Valira must send her a Message then, something just between them, because Finch's face crumples, and a second later, Valira is out the door, into the morning, and with one last grimace of apology, Haoti follows her.

*

Finch's guess is right. They're barely ten yards into the forest when Wren and Andula fall into step with him, and another twenty yards later, Rowan catches them, yawning and carrying his bow. None of them bothers speaking. Wren and Andula have their arms linked, Andula crying a little, and Rowan sometimes reaches out from her other side to put a bracing hand on her shoulder.

Andula and Wren stop together, after nearly an hour of walking, and after a trembling moment, Andula goes to one knee and throws her arm around Valira's neck. A second later, Wren joins her, and Haoti stands to one side. From the nonsensical half-conversations, he thinks Valira must be using Message again, and a minute later, they're standing, dashing tears off their cheeks, and Wren tells Rowan they'll see him that night before she turns around.

Rowan walks in silence with them for most of another hour, until the deer tracks they use to travel diverge, theirs leading north and his east. “Glad I found you,” he says briefly and to both of them.

“And I you,” says Haoti. Valira must chime in with a similar sentiment, because Rowan gives her a deep nod. “May your hunt be blessed and bountiful.”

“A true blessing from a beloved paladin,” says Rowan, to his surprise, and gives him half a smile when the surprise shows. “I haven't got any of the magic, like either of you, but I'm a little more devout than most of the family is. Sella got me in the habit. I probably wouldn't have invited you back to the settlement if I hadn't had the sense that he watches you closely.”

“I imagine he has his eyes on all of you too,” says Haoti, too baffled by that speech to respond properly.

Rowan snorts a little, like that's too obvious to comment on. “Travel safe.” And with that, he disappears down the track, blending in far better than Haoti knows how to.

After a moment, Haoti starts walking again, and after a little while, Valira lopes to catch up with him. _Can you read poetry and walk at the same time?_ she finally asks, when they're several earshots away, the forest swallowing them up.

“Better,” he says. “I can recite some.”

The longest poem he ever memorized is one he learned some ten years ago, long before he was called away from his father's service and into Seath's. It's in Elvish, from one of the few books of his mother's that his father kept around after she left, mostly because it was by a famous war poet, and he would let Haoti have that part of his heritage. In the back of the volume were three hundred lines of poetry about the growth of a forest from one central sapling that Haoti committed doggedly to memory, and he shares them now, sometimes having to bridge a gap that the years have left in his memory with his own awkward prose, but Valira doesn't seem to mind.

When he finishes, she doesn't need to ask him to keep going, and he does, pulling bits of poetry out of his head and never commenting that she remains a wolf long after she needs to.

*

After their early start, they reach the den long before dark, with plenty of time to cook a real dinner, so Haoti sets about it and lets Valira, newly human again, make her own decisions about what to do. She disappears for a while, almost long enough to worry him, but she comes back with a bowl full of ripe berries and settles against his side as he finishes cooking some of their fresher rations.

“Why do you know all this poetry?” she asks after a while.

“If I was reading the right kind of thing, my father would leave me alone. And then Seath would leave me alone, later. I just thought you would enjoy poetry more than generals' accounts of battles. And those are harder to memorize, anyway.”

It's an admission, the kind he knows Valira knows how to read. A truth for all the truths he's seen these past few days. And, as Valira always does, she avoids the obvious responses, the sympathy, the winces, the disdain of his cowardice at avoiding them instead of fighting against them. Instead, she tilts her head and says “Do you write poetry at all?”

“Not since I was young and trying to impress one of the army scouts at my father's fort. Mercifully, I never memorized those.” And then, while she's still laughing, “How long do you want to stay here?”

Valira sobers, though she doesn't withdraw as much as he feared she might. “Just tonight—truly, I promise. The traveling will be better for me than sitting around here would be. I was thinking of flying a little more westerly this time, see if we can get a glimpse of the ocean on the way back. Do you mind taking an extra day, maybe?”

“I'm in no hurry,” he promises, and dishes her out some food to eat so they have the excuse to lapse into the silence they both find more comfortable.

*

In the morning, they hike out of the woods. The trees are too thick for her to fly, and however much joy she takes in flight, Haoti thinks she likes the walking better, being able to see every tree as she passes, to point it out when they reach the traps and snares nearby villages set out. Haoti follows in her wake, and has enough sense of where they are to know that they're leaving a different way than they arrived, but doesn't bother with much more.

By the time they leave the scattered edges of the forest, it's nearly noon, and they stop for lunch, using most of the rations Finch gave them for it. “Are we stopping here and starting to fly in the morning, or are we flying for a while today?” he asks when she lingers after the meal instead of immediately shouldering her pack.

“Flying, I think. We can get a ways before dark, and I could use the time to clear my head.”

“Don't push yourself as hard this time,” he says when she stands up. “There's no emergency.”

Maybe that's too far to push, too much like ordering her around when she hates being managed, but after a moment, her face softens into a smile. “I won't. I can't help flying fast, but I won't push hard. Just have to balance that with Quil getting impatient.”

Haoti laughs and stands up himself. “We don't want to risk that, I admit.”

“Then we'll go, and we'll try stopping a few times on the way.” She still doesn't pick up her pack, though, just stands there watching him, a frown more thoughtful than unhappy on her face. “Haoti, thank you. I know that we don't talk about these things, but I can't leave that unsaid.”

“You don't owe me thanks.” He shakes his head, mostly so he has a moment to think about how to answer that. It's his first instinct to tell her that he owes her, that he'll owe her forever, but he can guess, now, the way that will shutter her expression, make her turn away and transform and not send him a Message, leaving them in silence until the magic forces her to land. Anything else is harder to say. Haoti understands oaths, and vows, and debt. This, he's not sure he ever will, but they've talked about it. He has to start changing what he understands. “You don't want me indebted to you. I don't want you indebted to me. And I hate that you feel simple kindness is something extraordinary enough to warrant that.”

Valira laughs a little, short and sharp and not very amused. “Sometimes it is. But I don't mean it that way. I can appreciate your kindness without saying there's a debt. That's all this is. And I thought you might appreciate my thanks more than you would appreciate me accusing you of being good or kind.”

His cheeks get hot instantly enough that it must prove her point, and somehow, in not many words at all, and all of them kind, they've argued themselves into a stalemate. He's heard her do it with Quil and Phi, kind words wielded as weapons—fond ones, but weapons nonetheless—and it's strange to be on the receiving end of it, and to try to give it in turn. “Fine. Thank you for your thanks, then. I'm glad I could help.”

Valira comes to him and offers her hands, and Haoti takes them automatically. “No debts. I've said it before. They don't matter for us.” Her mouth quirks into a smile. “We're family, remember?”

He still has the instinct to object, but he knows Valira, and knows how stubborn she can be, and what matters to her. As much as he thinks about the resurrection, she must think about Solomon's collar, about the death she couldn't prevent, about the months before she brought him back. Maybe their debts come out even in her mind. “You honor me. Thank you.”

Instead of teasing him for thanking her again when he has such trouble with the words, she kisses him. He's known for days that she wants to, and suspected they might be on that road even before she allowed him to accompany her to meet her family, but it still comes as a surprise. It's clumsy, unpracticed, too long a time since either of them tried, Haoti suspects, but she smiles against his lips before she pulls away. “Come on, then. Let's go home.”

*

_Tell me one of your own poems. You can't have forgotten them all,_ she requests when they're flying and he's not sure if the giddiness bubbling up in his chest is due to the flight or the kiss.

Haoti doesn't, exactly. He does something that takes far more courage, and tries to stumble his way into the right words to encapsulate these past few days, the family in the forest, fear and love and the quiet of the den bookending the harder parts, fishing and waiting for her and wanting desperately to protect her from the people who should love her.

It's a clumsy poem, and barely one. It doesn't follow any forms he knows of, and told in chunks of a few words a time, it's scattered and the metaphors are strange, inspired by the scenery as it passes beneath them, traveling north and west to take the long way home, until he can see a sliver of blue as the ocean starts coming in view.

And every time, no matter how clumsy his words or how silly he feels, every time he runs out of words Valira, again and again, says _Keep going,_ and he does.


End file.
